Preview of X Windows Eye Candy

glenkim writes "Remember Seth Nickell's blog entry about next generation X Window rendering? Well, in case you were wondering what it would look like, he's updated his blog with videos of luminocity, the experimental GNOME window manager, and screenshots of programatically themed widgets." From the post: "The wobbly window effect is mildly addictive. Kristian hasn't gotten much work done since he wrote it. He (and now I) spends all day moving windows around and watching them settle."

CoralCDN [mirror]

[danalien]

http://www.gnome.org.nyud.net:8090/~seth/blog/xsho ts [nyud.net]

... I'm just guessing this might get slashdotted...

Re:Can't Play The Videos

[natrius]

So download something that can [videolan.org].

Re:Can't Play The Videos

[ErichTheWebGuy]

nothing on my machine plays any of the formats he has

Try mplayer [mplayerhq.hu]

Re:CoralCDN [mirror]

[natrius]

Mirror of the Theora videos [stanford.edu]

Already

[cheezemonkhai]

Appears to be down or at least struggling already :(

Mirrordot should hopefully be created here:

Mirrordot link [mirrordot.org]

She's going down...

[Mmm coffee]

Already being slashdotted, here's the mirrordot mirror [mirrordot.org].

Posted with karma bonus so everyone will see this post, please don't mod me up as there's no point.

xgl

[elmartinos]

Yesterday I have tried Xgl, Which also uses OpenGL to draw X. I think Luminocity and xgl are tightly related, but I am not really shure.

Anyway, what I got was a stable desktop with nice shadow and transparency features. It looks totally cool to have a transparent mplayer behind a transparent xterm that drops a soft shadow on it :-)

Trying it out is fairly easy, just follow this description [gentoo.org].

Re:Pleasantly surprised

[Sunspire]

The current Luminocity effects are strictly tech-demos for now, basically showing what is possible. It will then be up to third parties like distributors and desktop environment to make something useful out of it.

The plan is to eventually merge the Luminocity composition manager and effect engine with the Metacity window manager. You will then be able to switch effects and behaviors like you do themes today.

Re:KDE equivalent?

[10Ghz]

KDE4 will propably have stuff like this. It should have double-buffered widgets, OpenGL-acceleration and Cairo-support, among other things.

Re:Gets old quick

[justsomebody]

It is not a feature to be, it is a quality test of performance while in development. More the test is intensive, the better it is

Re:Pleasantly surprised

[JPelorat]

Site is borked now, but they did say something like they turned the effect all the way up so it would be obvious in the video, but that it looked much better and much more natural when it just barely bounced when moved.

Re:Oops here we go again...

[mattyrobinson69]

It already exists: Mirrordot [mirrordot.org]

Re:Please get it right

[Anonymous Coward]

It draws windows, but it's called X-Window.

No it's not. From X manpage:

The X Consortium requests that the following names be used when refer-
ring to this software:

X
X Window System
X Version 11
X Window System, Version 11
X11

Re:Longhorn

[ardor]

Better. The effects are very similar to Longhorn eyecandy, but the costs are much lower. Note that he does all that stuff on an old Intel graphics chip. Longhorn requires much more GPU power.

Re:Buttons/windows still look archaic

[natrius]

With all the effort put into wobbly windows and transparency, it seems like they ought to have windows and buttons themselves looking fairly slick. Instead they look like a slight improvement over Windows 98.

Since this comment keeps finding its way up from -1, Troll, I guess I'll respond. GTK uses themes. [gnome-look.org]

Re:KDE equivalent?

[m50d]

Yeah, KDE's a gnome ripoff. That's why it started before gnome, has had IPC for all applications for years while gnome is only just adding it, had integrated remote access from 3.0 while gnome didn't add it until 2.6, is still the only environment to have a good way to embed applications in each other...I could go on.

I know, I know, don't feed the trolls.

Re:CoralCDN [mirror]

[danalien]

all of em' worked fine in MPlayer, for me...

Torrent

[TeknoHog]

here [cygnnet.jkl.fi]

Re:KDE equivalent?

[Anonymous Coward]

It should have double-buffered widgets, OpenGL-acceleration and Cairo-support, among other things.

Well, more specifically, Qt 4 will have those things, and KDE 4 will have them too because it will use Qt 4.

Dear Complainer

[Letter]

Dear Complainer,

The graphics card performs the effects. Therefore, you would have to read back the framebuffer of the graphics card for each movie frame. On low-end hardware like they used, that cannot be done in real-time. That doesn't mean it can't be done; it was just simpler for this blog entry to set up the camcorder.

Letter

How to run ogg video files in Windows

[baker_tony]

I went here

http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/

downloaded and installed, brought up Windows Media player and dragged and dropped the .ogg file on to it to play.

Re:Longhorn

[karstux]

Different thing. Avalon is an API which seems to be geared to bringing 3d-accelerated features to ordinary desktop programs, and to make this easy for the programmer. For example, in Avalon you can create a window, a rendering context and a simple scene with very few lines of code.

I guess you could use Avalon to create effects as shown in TFA. But it's really not limited to that.

In the end it's all about eye-candy though.. :-)

Re:CoralCDN [mirror]

[AsnFkr]

Mirror of AVI videos. [adventure-today.com]

Re:Buttons/windows still look archaic

[natrius]

If there are better themes out there and no Gnome developer I know actually uses the default *why* is it the default still?

There's going to be a new default theme in 2.12. The current frontrunner is ClearLooks. [gnome-look.org] If gnome.org wasn't dead right now, I'd link you to the wiki page, but for now you can read a snippet from Google's search results. [google.com]

Re:Torrent?

[TeknoHog]

I already posted this, but it's not modded up so maybe not very visible:

http://www.iki.fi/teknohog/luminocity-theora.torre nt [www.iki.fi]

Re:Nip it in the bud

[BenjyD]

Stationary windows will take just as much CPU in '3d' as they do in 2d - basically nothing. It's not like it's redrawing at 100fps or anything. Things like redrawing after exposing a part of a window will likely take less CPU, as the graphics card can just draw the relevant part of the window's texture to the screen without having to regenerate it.

I imagine resolution won't be much of a problem. For actual 3d work, there is all sorts of complexity that limits the fill rate - overdraw, lots of textures, fogging, geometry etc. This is a very simple 3d system: flat projection, little geometry.

A (say) 2000x2000 resolution screen is only 4 million pixels - cards like the geforce 2mx (which is ~$30 or so?) will do 500 million/second theoretical.

Re:XFixes, Damage and Composite

[havoc-]

I had this problem with ATI's fglxrx driver. Try using the open source one (radeon).

Re:Pleasantly surprised

[shawb]

He said the effect was turned up to maximum for the demo just so you could see it. Makes sense to make it really flashy when you first see it, then make it subtle for when you actually use it.

Re:KDE equivalent?

[nitehorse]

That's not true, actually.

If Cairo had been developed, ready, and stable before Trolltech had started developing Qt4, then they would most likely have included support for it. Cairo even today still isn't stable. To quote Carl Worth [freedesktop.org]:

If someone is crazy enough to think cairo belongs in a platform as stable software, right now, then I'll just go break some more APIs just to prove them wrong.

Keep in mind, Qt4 has been in development for quite a while now. They were showing off some crazy early development code back in August of 2003 - which predates Cairo even being remotely usable (let alone stable) by quite some time.

Re:nothing wrong with eye candy, but ...

[Reorax]

KDE 3.4 has this, I don't know about earlier versions. You can start a new session right from the menu, and you can switch back and forth with Ctrl+Alt+F7 and Ctrl+Alt+F8.

X *WINDOW* system

[mysticalreaper]

This comment may be late, and my get buried, but i just wanted to correct the slashdot title for this article. (Which is strange cause /. is so reliable for facts)

it is: X Window system
it is not: X Windows system

Can you see the difference? There is no s on 'window'. I know that MS has taught us all to use the word 'windows', but we should keep our heads and use the correct names for technology.

As a reference, i will cite the X.org Website [x.org] where they make reference to the "X Window System" extensively.

Thanks Zonk. You couldn't even copy from the submitter's words, who got it correct.

Re:nothing wrong with eye candy, but ...

[steveha]

Also, why don't we have fast user switching? I want to have multiple desktops belonging to multiple users, and switch between them quickly.

This, we do have. It's not identical to the fast user switching that XP does, but it get the job done.

On my Ubuntu system, Applications/System Tools/New Login gets a new login screen. I think it's basically just running another gdm (the login manager GNOME uses). Once you have two logins going at once, running this again pops up a switcher dialog; you can then choose to switch to a different login, or choose to start off another login.

In Linux there is a concept of "virtual terminals". Most Linux systems have six text consoles set up as the first six virtual terminals; if you hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 you pull up the first of these, tty1. Ctrl+Alt+F2 pulls up tty2, and so on. Your X session is bound to virtual terminal 7 and Ctrl+Alt+F7 should switch back to it.

Once you have additional login sessions going, these are on their own virtual terminals. If you get a second login it should be on virtual terminal 8 and Ctrl+Alt+F8 will pull it up.

In Ubuntu you can switch between logins and it will prompt you for a password, but if you switch using Ctrl+Alt+Fx it seems to stop prompting for a password after the first switch. That's a pretty fast user switch.

The new eyecandy-rich X stuff should make user switching even faster. If all windows live in offscreen buffers anyway it should be very fast to switch from drawing one desktop to drawing another.

steveha