Talk:Xgl

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Contents 1 Controversy - Drivers 2 Misc 3 The "Endless possibilities" 4 Cleanup 5 Ambiguous nvidia quote 6 Naming consistancy 7 First unified compositing window manager? 8 Playing the XGL-KDE demo? 9 Too many external links? 10 Lack of a definition 11 Citations

[edit] Controversy - Drivers

The statement that only closed-source nvidia and ati drivers can support Xgl is basically false. In my experience the Intel i810 driver with i9xx support work the best and they are totally open source (part of Xorg DRM). I should dig up some references and fix this section. --Jdz 22:00, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Misc

XGL, to me an old timer in the SW industry, also makes reference to the 2D and 3D Immediate Mode Gaphics Foundation Library developped and commercialized by Sun Microsystems (and Sunsoft) in the late 80's.

The XGL graphics library was capable at the time (probably still is) of rendering over the X11 protocol 2D and 3D primitives. So one could have a 3D design going on at one end of the network and share/display his or her work with remote colleagues through the network. XGL offers a full set of primitive calls and APIs and used an object oriented architecture to store/keep attributes and manage its internal structures.

XGL was initially written in C, and later rewritten in C++. Sun also designed an implementation of a "shortcut" to the X protocol (DGA, the ancestor of all DirectX variations it seems) that made it possible to accelerate the rendering of graphics primitives when the X server and client are running on the same workstation.

XGL supported multiple (Sun and Fujitsu) graphics accelerators, thus offering a wide range of capabilities for geometry graphics and graphics accelerations from simple 2D data to 3D realtime flight simulators with multiple lights, blending and texture mapping to run on a 20MHz Sparc.

In the early 90's, implementations of PHIGS, PEX, OpenGL, AUTOCAD, PTC and other CAD or graphics packages were running "on top of" XGL. XGL (and the Sun operating system) ran on both Sun hardware platforms and x86 PC's, with the first implementations running on intel 40MHz 486 based PC's with no specific graphics capabilities, just a dumb framebuffer (no missing zeroes in this sentence). I wonder what the speed is now on a multi GHz PCs.

-Patrick-Gilles Maillot--80.124.146.210 07:54, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

(In the memory of all the dedication and hard work of my friends at Sun. This link[1] makes a few references to the "old" XGL)

XGL is also an OpenGL driver late binding library for Linux born in 2002 and hosted at SourceForge[2].

---

This is so cool!

I have an issue with this statement: "[Mac OS X features] Quartz 2D Extreme, but this is disabled by default as it hasn't been production-ready for a long time (...)". I thought it was enabled ever since 10.1 or 10.2. I used it a few times, and it really is fast, with all the eye candy it has (I wouldn't believe it is *not* running on top of OpenGL). I would like to see a source backing this statement up. Now I'll search on my own. -- NachoKB 060211

People who put this back in seem to be saying that this is about Quartz 2D Extreme instead of the older Quartz 2D. Apple marketing material talks about Quartz Extreme that would be Quartz 2D + OpenGL apps + Quicktime apps. [3]--TuukkaH 17:37, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

I wouldn't have any problems removing the statement about not being enabled by default, because it seems to run stable now. Go ahead and remove if you like :) And, yes, this is about Quartz 2D Extreme, not Quartz 2D, which does not have graphics hardware based acceleration code. --Emmes 18:43, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

I think the statement is interesting as the default mode is probably what most people use and even more probably what you'll first meet. Some magazine already told that Novell isn't going to enable Xgl and Compiz by default in their next release, either. --TuukkaH 20:03, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The "Endless possibilities"

"Imagine a replacement for Apple's OS X's Dock", "Imagine an OpenGL accelerated Firefox with perfect smooth scrolling"... Yes, and imagine a section that didn't read like an advertisement... :-) Seriously, this section is nowhere near a neutral encyclopedia tone to me, and it reads all to much like an ad for Xgl. -- Jugalator 17:30, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

I would say both Capabilities and "Endless possibilities" sections added by the anonymous contributor severely lack in facts, notability and verifiability. "The writer of this section can imagine all of this and sees it happening but will not be developing it as he only started learning programming as of yesterday." I would be tempted to revert that all. On the other hand, perhaps the texts inspire someone to write down more facts. --TuukkaH 17:47, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

I would remove both sections immediately, they're far below standards. GhePeU 18:32, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

I removed them (they were commented); they can be recovered from the history if necessary.Tinus 21:12, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup

I did some cleaning up and tried to make it make more sense. I'm not sure if the stuff about not a lot of drivers being available should be here, and perhaps the comments on the NVidia presentation are too much of an opinion, couldn't really find a better way to put it.

I find all the names confusing (XGL, XGLX, XEGL, ddi, ddx), perhaps some kind of explanation of that should be at the top (and I may have mixed up somewhere). Oh, and I'm not so sure about text that goes with the image, actually the feature is in compiz, not Xgl, and I can't find the 'movie' connection. Tinus 21:12, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Do you want some other kind of a screenshot? I can't imagine showing Xgl in any other way than with an application that uses a feature that's only available in Xgl. The current image shows the desktop changing implemented in Compiz, sure, but the only way to accelerate XVideo on a cube like that is with Xgl. --TuukkaH 17:55, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ambiguous nvidia quote

In the Backends section, NVIDIA is quoted under the Xglx section as saying "this is the wrong direction." Do they disagree with Xgl in general? I thought they only took a stance against the Xegl-backed version. (If so, perhaps the quote should be move to the Xegl subsection to make this more clear.) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 192.160.6.253 (talk • contribs) 2006-02-27 16:18:11.

AFAIK NVIDIA thinks the whole idea in Xgl of writing X on top of OpenGL is the wrong direction, and the alternative of developing the current driver model would be in their interest. So the right place for the comment could be at Rationale where we mention AIGLX. --TuukkaH 17:55, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Naming consistancy

The article itself is Xgl, redirected from XGL, and the first line refers to Xgl. However, throughout the text, XGL (all caps) is variably used. Which is correct? - Estel ^(talk) 11:50, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

I could find one instance of the all caps variation in the article, plus some at External links - fixed to Xgl now. Don't confuse with GLX and AIGLX which are correctly all caps. --TuukkaH 14:26, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

XGL is *not* Compiz! The two screenshots are of Compiz, not XGL. You can't have screenshots of XGL because it is simply an infrastructure. --Flankk 00:50, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] First unified compositing window manager?

This is not true. Xfwm4, part of Xfce, has had an integrated compositing manager since 4.2.0, which was released back January 2005.

And DirectFB even before that :-)

[edit] Playing the XGL-KDE demo?

What do you people use to play "Ultra high resolution XGL-KDE demo and screencap" of External links? I haven't been able to play it out-of-the-box in any player I've tried in Debian Sarge: totem 0.100-5, mplayer 1.0-pre7cvs20060219-0.2sarge1, xine 1.0.1-1sarge2, vlc 0.8.1.svn20050314-1sarge1. Part of the problem is the unusually high resolution of 1920x1200. mplayer -vf scale=1024:640 xgl-kde.avi seems to work. What about audio, is there supposed to be any? MPlayer reports it as uncompressed but produces no sound. --TuukkaH 10:41, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Too many external links?

Does anyone else feel that there ar etoo many external links? This article shouldn't be the portal for all things XGL. I will go ahead and delete the ones I feel shouldn't be there if someone agrees with me. Jdufresne 01:54, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

There are a lot, but they mostly seem to be appropriate. I think they should be kept for the most part. Perhaps some should be under a References heading. BTW, I've condensed down the HowTo links into a single line.—Pengo 08:00, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

The "xgl live cd distro" has been take offline due to copyright violations. See it here. This can probably be removed, as it has been inactive for over a week and a half (when I first looked). Inklein 03:27, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Lack of a definition

I googled define:xgl and I came here... I've read all the article but didn't have a clear ideia what it was... How about a short definition about it?

[edit] Citations

Somebody else is asking for the source for the statement "Xegl is the future of Xgl and a long term goal of X server development." You can infer this statement from freedesktop.org's Xgl pages. However, no discuession at that meta-level has been documented in the notable sources. While the writing may be on the wall, no-one is coming out and saying this. Furthermore, while searching for a cite most references and links point back to this article. Perhaps this is an instance of original research?--Waveclaw 17:16, 3 December 2006 (UTC)