Hanno's blog

Phoronix has just published an article about the development of xorg and they have a statistics of contributors from Distributions.

I'm listed there on the Gentoo part with 0.01 % contributions to Xorg. Yay!

nouveau, the project for creating a free 3D linux driver for nvidia cards, recently got first support for real 3D applications with gallium on some NV4X cards (see Nouveau Companion 36). Today I got it working on a friends machine.

Here you can see an openarena benchmark (also uploaded on youtube). It got 55 fps, which is far away from the nvidia binary driver yet (178 fps), but at least more than my r200 setup (32 fps).

For the brave ones, here's a quick and dirty howto for Gentoo:
a) Get the nouveau overlay with svn co https://svn.hboeck.de/nouveau-overlay and add it to PORTDIR_OVERLAY in make.conf.
b) The nouveau-overlay won't install the nouveau/gallium-branch of mesa. Get my overlay with svn co https://svn.hboeck.de/overlay and also add that to your PORTDIR_OVERLAY (I'll try to contact the nouveau-overlay developer if we can merge this).
b) Add media-libs/mesa, x11-base/x11-drm, x11-libs/libdrm and x11-drivers/xf86-video-nouveau to /etc/portage/package.keywords and merge them.
c) If you've been running the nvidia binary driver, eselect opengl set xorg-x11, change the graphics driver in xorg.conf to nouveau, rmmod nvidia (if you've been running the binary driver), modprobe nouveau and start X.
d) Have fun!

Note: The nouveau developers consider gallium completely unsupported at the moment and don't want to get end-user bugs. If it runs, fine, if not, don't nag them with it.

Maybe you've read that I did some coordination on relicensing the old GATOS TV-Out code to make inclusion into the radeon driver possible (gatos was gpl, while xorg uses mit-license).

Now, shortly after that Alex Deucher started implementing tv-out in the randr-1.2-branch of the ati driver based on that code. randr-1.2 is the new and shiny stuff that will make future versions of xorg manage resolutions and output connectors much better. As you can see on the picture, today I played around with the new code and got it working (get Gentoo git-ebuild here).

As a short howto, on some cards (including mine), autodetection of the connector status doesn't work yet. You'll have to manually force the connector:

xrandr --addmode S-video 800x600
xrandr --output S-video --mode 800x600

This is especially exciting as it is the last features of my laptop that was missing for »full linux-compatibility« (some minor issues left, as the cardreader only reads sd at the moment, the modem needs a binary driver).

Read about Metisse just yesterday. A new approach to fancy/3D-Desktops by Mandriva. Unlike compiz, metisse has features that let you actually use windows in transformed status. Mandriva has some videos (Edit 2016: link down, archived version and videos on youtube) that show you some of the features.

As you may already have expected, I couldn't wait to create some ebuilds, so fetch my overlay (which is still called xgl, but don't care about that) for fancy x stuff and run emerge metisse:
svn co https://svn.hboeck.de/xgl-overlay

At the moment it requires it's own X-Server (very much like luminocity or xgl in the past), the window and composite manager is a modified variant of fvwm. After installing, run Xmetisse :1 on one console and on another one metisse-start-fvwm -wd :1. You'll get a fancy new desktop inside a window.

At the moment it very much looks like a design study, not really intuitive to use, but it has some interesting approaches. Nice to see that the linux desktop is evolving. For all non-gentooers, Mandriva has a live CD for you.

In den nächsten Tagen bin ich zweimal als Referent unterwegs.

Zum ersten morgen (Samstag), 13:00 Uhr beim come2linux in Essen über 3D-Desktops unter Linux (XGL/AIGLX/Compiz). Hab vor, das noch etwas auszubauen und insbesondere auf die Situation mit freien Grafiktreibern ausführlicher einzugehen.

Am Dienstag, 19:30 Uhr, wiederhole ich meinen Vortrag »Passwörter taugen nichts« in etwas ausführlicherer Form beim Computerclub Waiblingen (Gaststätte Söhrenberg, Waiblingen-Neustadt am Hallenbad).
Slides ODP, Slides PDF

This friday, there were two driver releases for linux graphics hardware. A new proprietary driver from nvidia and a new free driver for ati cards.

The release of the new nvidia driver was spread over all major news-pages. It's main new feature was the support of Xorg 7.1 just three months after it's release and about five months after the first release candidate. It still doesn't support the main new feature of Xorg 7.1, which is AIGLX. I couldn't find the release of the new free ati driver mentioned anywhere (even on linux news-pages) and probably even wouldn't have noticed if I wouldn't read the xorg-mailinglist. The new ati driver has much improved support for r300 and above chips, which is very important for the future development of 3D-desktops like compiz.

Now, the reason why this happens is probably that nvidia put out a colorful press release when they update their drivers. One could say that it's bad journalism from those news pages (especially if they are linux related) that if they get press releases from companies, they always post news, but they don't do so for rarely announced free releases. But news writers are lazy, if they get some ready-to-publish press release, they'll more likely take it than grabbing some announcement from some developers mailinglist. The problem from many free software projects is that their publicity sucks.

The work done by the xorg-developers to the ati-drivers is great. But I still meet people that even don't know the free drivers support anything above 9200. I never read big announcements on news pages about »free ati driver now supporting new card xy«. Now, if you have a look at the xorg-page, it doesn't even have release announcements. It looks boring. We know that xorg is cool, that it has wobbly windows and such, that development is happening. But looking at the webpage, it much more looks like xfree86.

This problem is not just related to xorg, it's just that I noticed this fact the last days (two driver-releases, only one noted). Same thing was e. g. with ffmpeg supporting h264 for a long time and then I read that some »I-forgot-their-name«-company said they'll bring a commercial h264-codec to linux. Or that about a week after ffmpeg supported wmv9 (also rarely noted by the public), real software said they want to bring wmv-support to linux. There's so much great stuff going on in free software development that would deserve more publicity.

Oh, and for a last note, Lars also has a nice example how not to do it.

Another update from the X-funky-and-cool-front: With some Patches from Kristian Høgsberg, I got compiz running with aiglx.

For those who don't know: Compiz is a combined window/composite manager that was released together with xgl earlier this year. aiglx is another approach to get 3D-accelerated Desktops on Linux/Xorg.

I've merged the appropriate (very experimental stuff, big fat warning!) gentoo packages into my overlay. For all non-gentooers: You are on your own, but you can grab Kristian's patches here. Update: Kristian told me that Fedora Rawhide users are also lucky.

You can get it with
svn co http://svn.hboeck.de/xgl-overlay
(It's still called xgl-overlay, although it should probably be named »various-funky-x-stuff« or so, but I was too lazy to rename it)

To install it, check it out like above, put the path into your PORTDIR_OVERLAY-var in make.conf. Then re-merge libdrm, mesa, xorg-server and compiz (all ~x86). You can also merge experimental libcm/metacity-packages (metacity with 3d-effects), therefore add xcomposite to your USE-flags and merge metacity-2.15.5.

To start compiz on aiglx (that means »normal« X):
LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 compiz --replace --strict-binding move resize minimize place decoration wobbly cube rotate scale switcher zoom &
gnome-window-decorator
(replace plugins with anything you want, the LIBGL-var and strict-binding are required for running in aiglx, this should be automatically detected soon)

For metacity use:
USE_WOBBLY=1 metacity --replace

As before, there is still a package for xgl, so you now can try both.