Kororaa Releases XGL LiveCD

Tony Tony Chopper writes "The team from Kororaa who brought us a GUI based Gentoo installer have just released the first live CD to use xgl technology. From Kororaa.org, the lead developer Chris writes 'Today I am happy to release a Kororaa Live CD showcasing Xgl technology.' The response so far have been incredibly positive, an article at tuxmachines.org is glowing with much praise and few complaints. For those who love eye-candy but don't want to mess with their existing installs, this is the perfect opportunity to see what Xgl is about. The torrent can be downloaded from LinuxTracker."

It's pretty...

Yes, it's pretty. But more importantly I feel like the functionality is there as well. I guess I'm going to force myself to make this work on my current Gentoo box.

zomg, sweet

Well the graphics are cool, but does it actually increase how useable my computer is? Not to mention the obivous questions like "will my crappy integrated graphics card even come close to running this?"

Either way, I think I'll give it a try ^^

Re:zomg, sweet

"Well the graphics are cool, but does it actually increase how useable my computer is?"
Yes. Of course not automatically, but it does provide a technical means that makes things possible that will increase usability. Take the expose like feature, or live previews when alt-tabbing, for example. And will of course make implementing accessibility (sp?) like zooming much easier to implement.

"Not to mention the obivous questions like "will my crappy integrated graphics card even come close to running this?""
I think one of the best things about XGL (and AIGLX for that matter) is that the hardware requirements for this are actually pretty low. So if you integrated graphic chip does do opengl, it should work.
Of course keep in mind that this thing is still in beta and that many drivers still lack the opengl extensions needed, so that many things that later will be done in hardware are now actually done with mesa in software.
That said, despite these problems, XGL runs very smooth on my quite old and not very powerful Geforce.

Mirrors.

The main site is down for some reason (slashdot does that). The torrent is mirrored at: http://mirrors.atarack.com/Kororaa-Xgl-Live-CD-0.1 .torrent [atarack.com] We have ISO mirrors here for the impatient: [softpedia.com] (thanks to softpedia [softpedia.com])
here [rdt1.org] (thanks to rdt1.org [rdt1.org])
here [mudrii.ath.cx] (thanks to Mudrii)
here [hotel-peter.net] (thanks to Hotel Peter [hotel-peter.net])
here [overconfident.org] (thanks to Over Confident) [overconfident.org]
here [bytemark.co.uk] (thanks to sefcom [sefcom.nl])
here [digitalextortion.com] (thanks to Digital Extortion) [digitalextortion.com], and
here [snipanet.com] (thanks to Chris Peters from Canada)
here [atarack.com] (Atarack VDS/VPSes who are our proud sponsors) [atarack.com]
(To buy an atarack VPS e-mail us at [e-mail] or at [e-mail])

Thank you!

I've been dazzled by the demo videos, and didn't feel like screwing up my machine just to try it out myself, can't wait.

Keep seeding that torrent!

Some thoughts.

First off, I tried it yesterday and it's really really neat.. I mean giggle like a schoolgirl neat when you first move that jiggly window around. I'm so glad someone finally did this cuz I was about to risk my xorg install to see it :)

For some reason I can't get the zoom stuff or anything involving the "Windows" key working though. Also, I wasn't able to get any video going in real time-- obviously I can't watch a DVD with the CD already in the drive... and streaming wasn't working. Also, I have two monitors but they weren't both detected.

But it's so cool. I have no right to complain.

A question-- Is it just me or is there a kind of aliasing that happens when a window stops moving? It's like it goes "soft" antialiasing as it bounces around, but then just before it snaps back into place it seems to get crisper...

All in all, this is a great CD to show around. Now when's the AIGLX demo LiveCD coming out? ;)

Is there a forum for more plugin ideas?

I liked how in one of the videos [freedesktop.org] apps that freeze or are unresponsive turn black and white to indicate they're "dead". It seems that with depth of field and lighting you could do quite a bit with the UI to hint at an application or window's state.

For example, as a dialog boxes pops up, at the same time the underlying windows might drop back and fall into a zone that is out of focus, or perhaps individual windows might literally "pop" up (growing larger with larger shadows). The shadows themselves could be "real" I would imagine, and the shadow could be generated via a virtual light source which could be moved manually or automatically throughout the day.

In short, some of the stuff I've seen seems to have been brought over from OS X, but the power of GLX and AIGLX seem seem to open up a whole new world of GUI possibilities. The zoom effect, combined with vector graphics seems to offer quite a bit to those with visual impairments, for example. Is there a place where UI gurus are talking about new effects that may not only provide eye candy, but increase the usability and even suggest new analogies or interactive effects to make computing easier/better?

Why a LiveCD?

I've always wondered, with usb many drives having greater capacity then CDs, why not setup LiveCDs to be run easily from a USB drive and also allow for some configuration data to be saved there?

I'd love to be able to test out distros on a thumbdrive...maybe it's just me though.

Re:Why a LiveCD?

* Because some people still have USB 1.0
* Because not everyone can boot from USB
* Because practically everyone has a CD drive
* Because it's easier to boot from a CD
* Because it's a lot cheaper to give your friend a CD than a thumb drive

Why not a living cd?

Can you imagine what this would do for Linux desktop uptake if it were a living cd instead? After booting up, you have an icon on the desktop that says "Install UbuntuGL". It copies the CD image onto the existing filesystem so the next boot from the CD mounts that as / instead of the cramfs file on the cd. Then bootup is maybe 10 seconds slower than a real install.

Maybe have the installer also create another file on the disk for the User's home dir. Have it automatically mount the existing filesystems like knoppix does. It would take some hacking, but have an overlay filesystem so they could install any programs they wanted permanently to their 'installed' os. Then people that know nothing about computers can use linux regularly without any hassle.

Of course not having a working NTFS driver makes this much more difficult technically. But just imagine saying you can replace your crufty Windows interface with Linux's opengl 3d one, for free, and still boot windows just by taking the cd out.

XGL rocks :-D

I've got it installed on all three of my Ubuntu PC's, and I may be throwing it on my Girlfriend this weekend.
I use it at work and LOVE it.
I've also got copies of this live CD to give out to anyone that likes what I can do.

I really expected it to get annoying but it doesn't, I find it kind of refreshing and it helps deal with all those layers of BROWN. :-P

One thing I have found strange is that it seems to work smoother and better on my laptop with a geforce go 5200 than it does on my 6600 FX card?!?!
Weird but cool.

Eye Candy Without Work?

"For those who love eye-candy but don't want to mess with their existing installs" Isn't that everyone :P

Slow?

The effects are cool and all GL stuff flies with speed, but basic xlib stuff in XGL is slow. Very slow. Resizing windows seems like 10 times slower than xorg, for a good test try opening a complex webpage and resize the windows. Is this something being worked on?

Always when I bring this up it gets dismissed as a configuration error. No, I don't think so. It's the same with this LiveCD as my own compiles before. I have tried on 3Ghz+ computers with Nvidia 6600gt and 6800 cards. In all these demo vides we have seen I have never seen a window resize. If it's just my computers than please upload somewhere a video where resize flies and let me see.

Before this is fixed all this is just a showcase toy. I understand it's new and not optimized but can we at least agree on that some REAL optimization is necessary? Because before it is as fast as xorg it's just useless for real work, and I would really like to have this.

GNOME deps

Anyone know if there's any plans for a standalone window decorator for Compiz? I've tried to get this working on my Gentoo box, and although XGL and Compiz both run, I don't have any window decorations since gnome-window-decorator requires the whole of GNOME to be installed. Now a couple of libraries I could handle, but the whole thing? Bollocks to that.

Great!!!

It works like a charm! I wish they'd invent similar aero thing like Vista has.

Hardware requirements?

Does anyone have any minimum hardware guidelines? I've downloaded the ISO, but as I moved to PowerPC systems roughly two years ago my best Intel box here is an old P3-450 with 384MB of RAM and an old 16MB ATI AGP video card -- probably significantly below the minimum specs (although I am going to try it and will report on it here).

I imagine I can find a system in the lab tomorrow to try it out on, but knowing what the hardware requirements are in advance will help me narrow down which system I should borrow for some testing :).

Yaz.

Re:Hardware requirements?

http://en.opensuse.org/Xgl [opensuse.org] http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_XGL#Prerequisites [gentoo-wiki.com]

WARNING... it kills network cards

The live CD did something to my onboard network card while it was being shut down... I've just spent the past hour trying to get networking working on this machine and in the end, the only solution was to boot up Kororaa and when it was running (and the network card LEDS were happily blinking) kill the power. Subsequent booting into Ubuntu now works (it was hanging after failing to synch the clock to the ntp server)

Finally, the Linux desktop is ready!

I had been eager to try this (Xgl + Compiz) out after seeing the Novell demonstration video [google.com], and finally tried it (using this Kororaa LiveCD) this morning.

It seems Linux desktop operating systems have finally caught up to (and overtaken, until Vista) Windows, for the most part. Most of the functionality has been there for a few years (especially since Ubuntu), and this makes it all extremely pretty, too.

Most of this is just graphical sugar, but some of it is also useful. There is a zoom feature which allows you to easily zoom in and out of your desktop, which I know I'll find useful when the position of my mouse is very important. Graphics editing, for example.

Another useful feature is similar a MacOS X feature where all of the windows on the desktop will be shrunk down and then arranged in a way that lets you click on one of them to bring it to the front.

The graphics are beautiful, and in my opinion, graphics do matter when it comes to how usable something is. If it's pretty, it becomes a more pleasant experience, and that simply means that people are happier with it.

When this makes it into a stable release of Ubuntu, Linux will be ready for the masses.

3dfx Hardware supported

I've been following this thread very loosely and had a quick question that maybe I didn't see elsewhere. Will any of the 3dfx series of Voodoo cards be supported. I noticed that the Mesa libraries were used for parts of this, and since (as I recall) the Voodoo2 and later cards were supported through Mesa, it would seem it would work...

However, the site lists only nVidia and ATI cards as being supported.

Anyone else have any input?

Gnome

ok, you cant call something Kororaa and use gnome as a window manager. granted gororaa isnt really a good name, but still, that's just wrong.

Nice....

Does it run on ATI, specifically the Radeon 9800 Pro? (Any that own this card and have tried getting it to work w/ compositing and OpenGL at the same time in Linux will know what I mean)

Tantalizing and frustrating

I just tried the LiveCD on my laptop. It works very smoothly for a random interval, then it totally locks up the machine. The Ati Mobile Radeon x700 works perfectly with the fglrx driver under "proper" Gentoo. I tried passing to the kernel ACPI=OFF NOACPI NODETECT NODHCP, but the result is always a lockup, sometimes even before the GUI startup ends. Maybe the chipset (Ati, again) is at fault, or maybe the specific version of the fglrx driver, or some obscure kernel option. Rather than seeing a brief (usually a minute or two) glimpse of what is possible, I would prefer an early stop with a big red sign "THIS WILL TEACH YOU BUYING ATI CARDS! AHAHAHAH!!!".

XGL is my new god

I tried this out last night, and it's amazing. Some of the effects I've kinda hacked with fvwm, but this is a whole new playing field. Unlike other software I've tried that does some of what XGL does, this actually does it fast and well. I'm really tempted to try this on my gentoo box, but i'm unsure about the stability, anyone use XGL day to day? I know it's not ready for public release but I want it NOW :-)

Re:Is it? Is it really?

Wow, Xgl sucks? That's ok, i wasn't going to bother downloading it anyway.
Please, don't bother pointing out the logical fallacy in this argument

Re:That great, but I'm having trouble with OpenGL

Anyone else having problems or a solution to this?

Since you have given us such a wealth of information with which to diagnose your problem, I am going to try to be equally illuminating in my answer.

The solution is for you to fix your system. Maybe try and work out what changed a few months ago and then reverse it.

Hope this helps - no need to thank me.