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Operating Systems => Linux and UNIX => Topic started by: RaZoR1394 on 26 February 2006, 14:48

Title: Xgl
Post by: RaZoR1394 on 26 February 2006, 14:48

Wow this Xserver is really cool. I think you should check it out.

Quote from: "Wikipedia"

Xgl is an X server (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System) architecture, started by David Reveman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reveman), layered on top of OpenGL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL) via glitz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitz). Nowadays, most PCs are shipped with a 3D graphics card (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_graphics_card) (foremostly from NVIDIA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVIDIA) or ATI Technologies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Technologies)) and Xgl allows the X server (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_server) to take advantage of its 3D processing power, assuming suitable drivers are available.

Wikipedia link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xgl)

Ubuntu howto (http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=127090)
Gentoo howto (http://gentoo-wiki.com/XGL)

Seems like all major desktop systems are moving towards hardware acceleration (OSX, Windows Vista and GNU/Linux). Well, I'm not entirely sure but I think that this can be a very good alternative for those with newer ATI cards who want to use real transparency as fglrx doesn't work with xcompmgr. Remember that this isn't even beta software but alpha so it might be unstable.

BTW, check out these videos:

Gnome and XGL (http://unfoog.de/%7Exororand/img/vid/xgl-video-04-gnome.mpeg4)
KDE and XGL (http://unfoog.de/%7Exororand/img/vid/xgl-video-03-kde.mpeg4)
Another KDE and XGL video (http://www.informatik.hu-berlin.de/%7Erhenning/video.mpg)

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: H_TeXMeX_H on 27 February 2006, 03:17

So ... this means more flashy desktop interface ... or something more than that ?

That GNOME vid is funny ... all the windows are wobbly ... like they're made of jello. I don't quite see a use to the wobblyness other than "oooohhhh ... neat ..."

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: Lead Head on 27 February 2006, 04:18

If you show a windoid that they will be like "leik! OMG! TEH WINDOWS ARE TEH WOBLY! ME WANTS NOW BIZATCH!"

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: mobrien_12 on 27 February 2006, 07:58

There's a fedora project like this right now.

I think it's cool that people are doing this, just 'cause they can.  However, I probably wouldn't use it.  

There's no point.

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: Refalm on 27 February 2006, 09:18

It does serve a use in a Windows vs. Linux argument:

"Look, Linux can do useless effects too, just like Windows Vista and Mac OS X can!"

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: Orethrius on 27 February 2006, 09:39

Quote from: Refalm

It does serve a use in a Windows vs. Linux argument:

"Look, Linux can do useless effects too, just like Windows Vista and Mac OS X can!"

You bastard.  Now I have to change MY sig.  :D

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: Pathos on 27 February 2006, 11:51

arg what format is that first kde one...

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: Lead Head on 27 February 2006, 12:56

First is mpeg4
seconded is just mpeg

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: RaZoR1394 on 27 February 2006, 12:58

mpeg4? I know, the creator used a weird fileextension, hehe. However it plays back fine with mPlayer. Try that (mplayer for win32 if you have Windows).

Well what I do like about this is that the whole desktop comes alive somehow. It's no longer that dead 2d desktop anymore. And not just that... I think It's possible to achieve true transparency without support in the drivers for xcompmgr like ATI.

However I just checked the howto and It seems that you need modular X.org (7.0) so the process of installing this sucker will be pretty big.

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: H_TeXMeX_H on 27 February 2006, 20:25

[OFFTOPIC] Mplayer's the best, it runs everything (I have yet to find a video it won't run ... even embeded ones ... even mpeg4) [/OFFTOPIC]

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: Lead Head on 27 February 2006, 20:43

mPlayer!?! Thats an ancient version of windows media player.

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: H_TeXMeX_H on 27 February 2006, 20:53

Mplayer is under GNU GPL ... so how can that be ? I don't get it.

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: Orethrius on 27 February 2006, 22:59

Methinks someone has confused MPlayer with the Windows codename for Media Player Classic.

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: Lead Head on 27 February 2006, 23:42

correct:(

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: Refalm on 28 February 2006, 10:39

So no one except me here actually likes VideoLAN?

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: Lead Head on 28 February 2006, 12:52

I like it.

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: Orethrius on 28 February 2006, 16:00

I like VLC just fine, but when the de facto standard of sites like YouTube and YTMND tends to be *grrr* WMV */grrr*, one tends to like the software that can help them track down the original (99% of the time, standards-compliant) video.  That would be mplayer.

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: Jack2000 on 28 February 2006, 17:37

MPC does it for me :)
it works just the way it is
no need for continuous updates and lame skins and
big fat load of shit like the MS one ! :D
 ... simply ... Classic

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: RaZoR1394 on 28 February 2006, 18:11

There is some more info with audio and video clips over here, http://www.novell.com/linux/xglrelease/ (http://www.novell.com/linux/xglrelease/) , http://en.opensuse.org/Xgl .

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: Refalm on 28 February 2006, 20:04

Quote from: Jack2000

MPC does it for me :)
it works just the way it is
no need for continuous updates and lame skins and
big fat load of shit like the MS one ! :D
 ... simply ... Classic

MPC isn't for Linux.

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: WMD on 28 February 2006, 22:36

Quote from: Orethrius

I like VLC just fine, but when the de facto standard of sites like YouTube and YTMND tends to be *grrr* WMV */grrr*, one tends to like the software that can help them track down the original (99% of the time, standards-compliant) video.  That would be mplayer.

YouTube uses Flash to play video, not WMV.

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: Orethrius on 28 February 2006, 23:20

Quote from: WMD

YouTube uses Flash to play video, not WMV.

 Decompile it some time.  You'd be surprised.  ;)

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: RaZoR1394 on 9 March 2006, 20:57

I just tried the new Kororaa XGL 0.1 livecd which includes Xorg 7.0, XGL and Compiz. It works great on my X850XT. It has become very popular so using the torrent download is preferred.

 LINK (http://getkororaa.com/)

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: piratePenguin on 4 June 2006, 16:43

Quote from: RaZoR1394

I just tried the new Kororaa XGL 0.1 livecd which includes Xorg 7.0, XGL and Compiz. It works great on my X850XT. It has become very popular so using the torrent download is preferred.

 LINK (http://getkororaa.com/)

I just downloaded the Kororaa XGL 0.2 livecd, it's INSANE!!
Runs blissfuly with my radeon 9600 pro.
http://people.freedesktop.org/~davidr/xgl-demo1.xvid.avi
look at that video if you just want to see what it can do without running it.

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: mobrien_12 on 5 June 2006, 01:22

Thanks for the video link pirate Penguin.

I see some limited usefulness.  The ability to run OpenGL really fast but not full screen is good.  The super task switcher is good.

The rest... well it's just cool.  Useless, but cool.

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: piratePenguin on 5 June 2006, 01:40

Quote from: mobrien_12

Thanks for the video link pirate Penguin.

I see some limited usefulness.  The ability to run OpenGL really fast but not full screen is good.  The super task switcher is good.

The rest... well it's just cool.  Useless, but cool.

True. compiz, the compositing manager that's responsible for all the effects, is extensible. Each effect can be disabled on the fly (from the (quite nice) graphical configuror, or from any gconf editor).

By the time this is on by default in distros, most probably, effects will be enabled and disabled according to the hardware and the driver's abilities by default - like in Vista.

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: adiment on 8 June 2006, 03:50

XGL isn't too bad. Runs alright here, the effects are beautiful; but not smooth enough. Like dragging windows too much (with that water effect) lags it down and it'll break at some points.

tried it out a few days ago and just went back to 'normal' gnome due to not being able to change anything in nvidia-settings and not being able to view video or anything that uses OpenGL...However I found some of it very overdone, like the very useless cube-effect between desktops.

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: piratePenguin on 8 June 2006, 04:21

Quote from: etement

XGL isn't too bad. Runs alright here, the effects are beautiful; but not smooth enough. Like dragging windows too much (with that water effect) lags it down and it'll break at some points.

tried it out a few days ago and just went back to 'normal' gnome due to not being able to change anything in nvidia-settings and not being able to view video or anything that uses OpenGL...However I found some of it very overdone, like the very useless cube-effect between desktops.

Alot of it is overdone and useless - that's what they want at this stage.

You can disable any of the effects. The livecd doesn't have the dedicated graphical configuror, so you gotta use gconf-editor and navigate to /apps/compiz/ (IIRC) and uncheck whatever effects you don't want.

If I was running Xgl long-term, alot of the "useless" effects would be disabled. The "useless" effects just demonstrate the power and what's possible (so in that way they're not not-quite useless).

The "cube-effect between desktops" is there because of the other useless effect that when you hold CTRL + ALT and click + drag with the mouse on the desktop, you can spin the cube manually and look at it from different angles etc.

It demonstrates the power (try watching a video in totem, move it to the far-left or far-right of a workspace so it extends between two workspaces and then do the CTRL + ALT and click + drag thing on the desktop and continue watching the video while moving the cube...), but it's not very useful other than that.

EDIT: A related and kinda-cleaner way to get all these cool effects is through aiglx (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RenderingProject/aiglx) (which is included in Xorg 7.1). compiz runs on aiglx too, so it's basically the same effects - just cleaner (Xgl is like a seperate Xserver or something, which is messy... But I don't really understand the details).

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: adiment on 8 June 2006, 07:51

nice. going to keep an eye on aiglx.

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: piratePenguin on 30 June 2006, 17:12

yeeaaaaaaa!! got compiz to work on aiglx, which uses the free DRI drivers..
I was told it'd be very very slow, the DRI drivers being crappy for my card - but it's actually pretty fast, definitely usable, and I can do all that useless stuff running a video on the corner of the cube etc.

even the useless crap works alright, except the 'water' plugin, the CPU usage spikes with it on but it's completely useless anyhow.

At times it can use quite alot of CPU usage (as in the CPU usage for my user can get to like 80%, very rarely anything above that), but that's probably down to the incomplete driver.
http://piratepenguin.is-a-geek.com/~declan/crap/compiz.png

The wobbly windows and the cube are insane smooth, and FFS when I use them now my CPU usage goes down! whatever that's about..

even wobbly windows on totem while running a video is smooth, beforehand just moving them would make it go choppy! that was one of the things I admired on Mac OS X, moving a video while it's playing was smooth...

if anyone wants to try it out and has a radeon (9600s and under are better, the drivers are much more stable and fast) or an intel card (they have brilliant, complete free drivers) and ubuntu, here (http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=145068)'s the instructions I followed.

/me goes to fiddle with the compiz plugins :)

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: RaZoR1394 on 28 December 2006, 23:37

Gentoo now has both Beryl and Compiz in the Portage tree. Impressive!

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: RaZoR1394 on 21 June 2007, 23:01

The new joint Beryl and Compiz - Compcomm.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=E4Fbk52Mk1w

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: Jack2000 on 21 June 2007, 23:08

nice...

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: Refalm on 22 June 2007, 19:53

Someone I know had a laptop with Windows Vista installed standard.
He was deciding if he should keep Vista, or destroy it and use Windows XP.

He kept Vista because you where able to make desktop icons smaller or bigger, by holding Ctrl and using the mouse wheel.
The video memory draining effects was a great help too. XGL and the likes are very important for the adoption of Linux as a desktop platform.

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: Lead Head on 23 June 2007, 19:43

Quote from: Refalm

Someone I know had a laptop with Windows Vista installed standard.
He was deciding if he should keep Vista, or destroy it and use Windows XP.

He kept Vista because you where able to make desktop icons smaller or bigger, by holding Ctrl and using the mouse wheel.
The video memory draining effects was a great help too. XGL and the likes are very important for the adoption of Linux as a desktop platform.

Don't forget Windows Key + Tab  :p

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: Refalm on 23 June 2007, 22:14

Well, Ctrl+Alt+Right (XGL shortkey) got officially more Wow's today than Windows+Tab ;)

Title: Re: Xgl
Post by: piratePenguin on 23 June 2007, 22:50

Don't forget Ctrl + Alt + Delete!!