digital home of MacSlow

From the “because we can”-department… comes this set of screencasts. The ogg-theora clip doesn’t fully show the nice blur in all it’s glory due to the compression. Try the avi-h.264 if you can for a more crisp view.

(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~970 KBytes)

(click to play back, avi/h.264, ~2.5 MBytes)

What you see is Ubuntu EdgyEft (therefore gnome 2.16), the new 1.0-9625 driver from nvidia (finally with native support for GLX_texture_from_pixmap) and the compiz-fork beryl. While the fragment-program based gaussian blur (using a 21×21 kernel btw) from the blurfx-plugin is not a productivity enhancer in any way (more a shameless mimicking of Vista’s areo-glass) it is a clear indicator that OpenSource is once more able to beat the proprietary solutions at their “own game”.

People have nagged me about handing them the code for this…

so here it is. But it will not be of much use I think. It’s not written in a way to be a clean example of how to use raw Xlib and XRender in particular. It is more a scribbled something for me to remember what I sofar learned about XRender, while diligently collecting pieces of hints and information from everywhere. Thus you might or might not get the logic behind my comments in the sourcecode.

First of all I’m back in “business” again thanks to some very generous and helpful people from the community. I had some nasty problems with my old (and warranty-less) graphics-card. Within a few days I got a shiny new eVGA GeForce 7900GT sent to me by Brad Griffith, and donations from several other people from the community even enabled me to replace my dying CRT with a Samsung SyncMaster 215TW. The new hardware is terrific (proprietary driver or not *g*)! Super huge thanks to everybody for their awesome support! The next release of cairo-clock 0.4.0 will therefore become “the community-appreciation release” *g*

Speaking of cairo-clock 0.4.0 I want to hear everybody’s opinion on a certain thing I’ve on my mind for some days now. Getting to know XRender better and and its support for convolution-filters (read: blurring and smoothing stuff) I encountered the current lack of any hardware support for this compute-intense operation. Convolution-filters are not yet hooked up into cairo itself and according to core Xorg-hackers they are not hardware-accelerated anywhere in pure FOSS-drivers (not even with proprietary drivers). So I want to pull in OpenGL as an additional dependency for cairo-clock - so it becomes a cairo/OpenGL-clock - to be able to do the blurring and a bunch of other nice things in a hardware-acclerated way (using fragment-programs).

Waiting for XRender’s convolution-filters to be hardware-accelerated and hooked up into cairo might be still some months off I assume. I actually agreed to help out with getting them into cairo, but for the moment I rather want to get cairo-clock 0.4.0 done and out of my head. So what do people using cairo-clock think? Could you live with cairo-clock also depending on OpenGL for even better and smoother graphics? I’m not talking about fully floating 3D-clock-objects on your desktop… yet. It will still be strict 2D… for the most part, but not all *g*

From the *sigh³*-department… that’s a dying graphics-card and no warrenty for it. It behaved mushy for several weeks now (freezing Xgl/Xorg several times in a week). But just this morning my box froze 5 times within half an hour. My nerves can take some beating, but that’s too much for sure. At this spot big thanks to Nokia for the 770 again. Without that I would be pretty net-access-less. I’m “typing” this on the 770.

I’ll be away from things (hacking, email, forums, messing around) for an undetermined period. No idea how and when I can get hands on a new working PCIe graphics-card (this time with a warrenty *grrrrrr*). So if you need to reach me the best option are comments here on my blog.