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Has everyone seen the XGL demo video floating around? The effects are amazing given the state of the linux desktop environment, which basically seems to lag a bit behind windows and a lot behind mac. Essentially, it's all the features that vista has been touting (and more). Transparency, window effects, 3d desktops, etc. I think some of the more knowledgeable linux types can play with it now, but it's not ready for primetime yet.

http://www.freedesktop.org/~davidr/xgl-demo1.xvid.avi

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I can wait to see Enlightenment running on top of that :turned:

It's still like alpha stage so not even close to everyday use.

True, but there are alpha stages and "alpha stages" (eg. E17 is completely usable, needs lots of work but doesn't have major problems).

As soon as I find time to move to the modular xorg I'll check what kind of "alpha" is this one.

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I was under the impression that the XGL project had been abandoned.

--Alex

same here. It looks like it's back tho... I think the Novell is using XGL if i remember correctly (I mean using it in it's desktop distros future releases, non-current), so I assume the project was restarted :)

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I can't tell for sure, but I don't thing they'll be using anything above OpenGL 1.4 :unsure:

needs Pixel Shaders, that's it

at the moment it runs as a full screen window using GLX to talk to the hardware, in the future though it will use XEGL (using egl hardware acceleration) so it can run by it's self.

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Anyone running xorg 7 can get Novell's XGL running right now if they want to.

But, It will be interesting to see which distro will be the first to use XGL. I think Novell would like to be the first, but I'm sure there are many bleeding edge distros working on being the first to have those bragging rights.

The trick will be to make sure that XGL is used for graphics cards that can handle it and regular X server is used for those cards that can't.

At this point it seems likely that at least some Linux distros will have a hardware accelerated desktop before Microsoft's Vista is released.

It's nice to see Linux catching up to the desktop standard set by Apple's OS X. This is a remarkable feat for a free OS.

It's also incredible that a free OS can beat a huge multi-billion dollar corporation like Microsoft to the punch in catching up with features that have been around on another OS for several years.

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i like this, to me it gives me the feeling that the OS itself has more "life" to it so to speak

i realised i posted b4 i even watched the whole thing, im at the quake part , and all i can say is wow, this beats vista in my book, ive never seen accelerated video like this before or accelerated opengl its amazing

Edited by Solarix
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Anyone running xorg 7 can get Novell's XGL running right now if they want to.

But, It will be interesting to see which distro will be the first to use XGL. I think Novell would like to be the first, but I'm sure there are many bleeding edge distros working on being the first to have those bragging rights.

The trick will be to make sure that XGL is used for graphics cards that can handle it and regular X server is used for those cards that can't.

At this point it seems likely that at least some Linux distros will have a hardware accelerated desktop before Microsoft's Vista is released.

It's nice to see Linux catching up to the desktop standard set by Apple's OS X. This is a remarkable feat for a free OS.

It's also incredible that a free OS can beat a huge multi-billion dollar corporation like Microsoft to the punch in catching up with features that have been around on another OS for several years.

Probably RedHat/Fedora or SuSe... But for the moment you need an ATI Video Card, or at least the newest NVIDIA Chipsets :(

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http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=127090

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewforum-f-51.html

http://en.opensuse.org/Xgl

I've found it easiest to go the ubuntu way. Unless you want to spend the rest of your life installing gentoo, moving to modular X then finally trying to install Xgl.

The jaggies aren't too pretty though but that's a minor thing.

snapshot35yg.th.png

Yeah...just like all the demo vids...

post-27048-1139780957_thumb.jpg

Edited by Rob2687
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To start it in a windowed mode do:

(ATI users)

Xgl :1 -ac -accel xv:pbuffer -accel glx:pbuffer

or

(Nvidia users)

Xgl :1 -ac -accel xv -accel glx:pbuffer

Note the :1. You can't start it on :0 because Xgl has to run on top of xorg 7.0 or something along those lines.

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