Big, big, big thumbs up to the Xorg/Mesa-developer crowd and the hackers behind the intel-driver for OpenGL 2.x support (especially FBOs and GLSL)! Also big props need to go to Bryce Harrington and Alberto Milone for integrating this and pulling in all the needed bits and bytes into Ubuntu! It’s one thing to see stuff landing on f.d.o git, but only when it reaches “mere mortals” in the form of repository-updates it’s truly there (read: where the end-user “sees and feels” it).
“Yeah, yeah nice talking, Mirco. But what’s in it for me?”
Unless you’re not into developing OpenGL-based code yourself, but want to see direct results of this new feature-slickness in a full FOSS-GL stack, I’ve something for you… a screencast of course (make sure to download it to disk and play it back from there):
So there you have it. Under current Karmic Koala you can now enable the gaussian-based (read: good looking) blur. While that’s nice and dandy, this by itself does not mean much in terms of new features or productivity-enhancing applications. But it’s another important step towards OpenGL-feature-parity with the proprietary GL-drivers. BTW, what works here with my i965, should also work with ATIs R500-class GPUs under the free driver afaik. I think the free intel- and radeon/ati-driver are about at the same level of implemented features for i965 and R500. Not sure though about the R600 and R700. I guess they are a bit behind still.
Note: In this screencast you see two personal tweaks I maintain and usually carry around (read: reapply them on updates). That is to say, genie-look for the magic-lamp effect of compiz animation-plugin (gee, what a mouth-full *g*) and use of the blur-hint for compiz’ blur-plugin in libgksu.
If you like to try them yourself you can grab them for current Karmic Koala (upcoming Ubuntu 9.10) from my PPA here. Note that I do not always update these in my PPA once either libgksu or compiz-fusion-plugins-main got updated via normally published updates from the repository.
The pedantic reader now might ask, “Why don’t you push your patches to the relevant packages (or upstreams) proper?”. Regarding the blur-hint in libgksu the answer is, that my patch hardly would pass update-policy and this visual tweak is not part of Ubuntu’s visual features. Also we’re well past feature freeze. For the upstream-part of the answer is: Isn’t libgksu meant to be replaced by something else soon? So why bother shortly before the switch. Please correct me if I’m wrong here. For the patch to compiz-fusion-plugins-main the (upstream) answer is: The genie-look of the magic-lamp effect once was part of upstream, but was removed due to fear of some patent-issues. Still, I like the genie-look best, that’s why I “resurrected” this bit.
