Looking over the fence
I found this via OpenGL.org. If you have 10 minutes to spare and are interested in the viewpoint regarding OpenGL vs. DirectX10 from a Windows-developers perspective go ahead and read it. I honestly have no idea how much of the stated claims about the grief with Vista and DirectX10 are true, but boy does that sound nasty!
And yeah… go and see the tech-demo John Carmack did at the Apple’s WWDC2007 (link of the demo at youtube.com)
Disregarding Vista and DirectX10 the near and long term roadmap for the evolution of OpenGL (OpenGL 2.x, codename LongsPeak - OpenGL 3.0, codename Mount Evans) looks very sweet and I’m excited about all the new capabilities we will get!
BTW, did I mention that we should… ehm… need to embrace OpenGL more vigorously under GNOME? 
June 27th, 2007 at 12:42 am
The main problem about OpenGL is currently that there is no real support in the free graphics drivers at the moment. If you run free graphics drivers your glxinfo will tell you:
OpenGL version string: 1.3 Mesa 6.5.2
OpenGL 2.0 is out for several years, but we still have no support of it in the free drivers
PS: I failed your captcha five (!) times - is there no way to handle spam on a way like other spam filters work? Dspam like or spamassassin like?
June 27th, 2007 at 2:08 am
I challenge you on your last statement:
> need to embrace OpenGL more vigorously under GNOME?
In what aspect does it need to be embraced ?
GL widgets ?
GL effects ?
GL ninjas ?
June 27th, 2007 at 3:00 am
Take a look at the interests and viewpoints of gnome’s Father ( Miguel de Icaza ) here
http://port25.technet.com/archive/2006/08/11/Let_2700_s-talk-Mono_3A00_–Sam-interviews-Miguel-de-Icaza.aspx
May be you can convince him of porting elisa in mono.
. He sounds interested in doing compiz effects in mono.
June 27th, 2007 at 3:09 am
Correct link is here
http://port25.technet.com/archive/2006/08/11/Let_2700_s-talk-Mono_3A00_–Sam-interviews-Miguel-de-Icaza.aspx
June 27th, 2007 at 8:45 am
Hi
It would be nice if gtk+ had some gl effects on it’s widgets. Doesn’t QT4 offer some of this functionality? (I think it’s the new graphicsview widget, but i could be wrong) The gnome desktop need to be more appealing
BTW nice progress on elisa. Looks great!
June 27th, 2007 at 10:41 am
The worst part is that the DirectX10 requirements are just fake, to force people to buy Vista if they want to play certain games:
http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6146&Itemid=2
It’s just the online capabilities that are supposedly Vista only, and it wouldn’t surprise me the least if those were easily portable.
Oh, and your captcha implementation sucks, requiring me to retype my comment if I get it wrong.
June 27th, 2007 at 10:45 am
Liquidat: Mesa recently released version 7.0 which supports 2.0 features. However I haven’t heard of anyone getting it to work on Feisty yet.
I have noticed a sudden increase in discussions on OpenGL vs D3D. Hopefully (and I’m thinking up ways to help) this could be an opportunity to push cross-platform game development.
June 27th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
the most important thing we need in opengl is the same "unified" shader model as in directx, eg. geometry shaders and all the cool advanced passing-data-around-on-the-gpu without framebuffers and stuff.
June 27th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
check this project out, it’s a opengl widget and supports gtk+
http://www.clutter-project.org/
June 27th, 2007 at 4:48 pm
Luke, thanks for pointing out. It is awful that the mass media didn’t really reported about that!
June 27th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
> need to embrace OpenGL more vigorously under GNOME?
Maybe it’s time to jump on the kde4 wagon?
I think the Plasma team would greatly benefit from your support, please consider joining their efforts!
June 28th, 2007 at 11:48 am
@liquidat: It’s true that free OpenGL drivers are a bit slow to pick up. Nevertheless Mesa 7.0/7.1 will offer OpenGL 2.0/2.1 (thus GLSL) support. But to be fully correct the different DRI-drivers will have to actually implement them. Best chances are intel’s drivers and the nouveau one, although nouveau is still young and not considered ready for easy consumption by end-users. Despite the current lack of Mesa 7.0/7.1 deployment on any scale one can still stick to fragment/vertex shading-assembly to beef up your applications display capabilities (e.g. GPU-accelerated image-filters for gimp, accelerated movie-rendering, filter effects for cairo/librsvg/inkscape/gtk etc.). It’s not like there’s no support. Just use what’s available.
@Wade: In terms of a generic GL-widget GtkGlExt offers a nice binding to gtk+. Based on that more specific widgets would be nice for the short term (e.g. image/video-display with smooth transition effects, data-visualization widgets, ). Regarding "effects" a stock set of filters accelerated by the GPU - if available - makes much sense. Not only would gimp be able to make good use of that but also inkscape, evince (e.g. this could be used to highlight search-terms found in a pdf by slightly greying out most of the page, but leave the found search-terms at full contrast). In the long run having all drawing and filter-operations be executed by Xgl, which in turn does everything via OpenGL, is a desirable long term goal. But for the meantime more immediate support in gtk+, gstreamer & co would be great.
@blessmark: For the moment mono does not offer anything of the foundation bits needed for elisa. Furthermore I have the impression that the elisa team is very happy with the offerings from Python and all the Python-bindings for gstreamer, pigment, twisted etc. Personally I might have had an easier start with elisa/pigment if they offered C#-bindings. I imagine the transition C/C++ -> C# is smoother then C/C++ -> Python. BTW, afaik the mono-bindings for compiz did not yet yield any flood of new plugins. Every plugin written for compiz is ANSI C. BTW, both links you posted don’t work.
@ANONIM: From what I know Qt’s arthur rendering-framework is able to execute all drawing operations via GLSL, if the underlying hardware/driver combination supports it.
@Luke: Well, thanks to Linux, MacOS X and PS3 games (all to varying degrees of importance
OpenGL-based rendering-engines for games are not going to move away anytime soon. In addition to that I strongly assume sophisticated "embedded gaming" is solely based on OpenGL|ES. Also seeing desktop-graphics outside of the Windows-world demanding OpenGL (either directly or as an underlying acceleration means through an abstraction layer) more and more it’s good to bet on OpenGL imo.
@pascal: That is the case with OpenGL 2.x. Only nobody make a bit PR-fuss about it.
@dude1: I heard of that
@liquidat: *g*
@Libe: KDE4 does really seem to become interesting. I might take a closer look at it from time to time. But in the end I’m a GNOME-user at heart and want to do my things mainly on that platform. But this does not rule out to things on with KDE/Qt from time to time.
June 28th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
Definitely need to fix the wrong-captcha-deletes-your-post bug!
June 29th, 2007 at 12:56 am
@ rillian: Yeah, I know… you’re right Ralph. But I hate web-stuff so much
I’ll try to address it this weekend.
June 29th, 2007 at 7:59 am
hi macslow,
You can search mono from the page where my link goes, and follow the first link. I guess copy and paste is doing some sort of ASCII change of the characters.
Well i know practicability issues are different. Mono framework is yet to prove itself and a new technology. But as far as i know Miguel is focusing on it because of its interplatform image and he likes it for raising the standards of application coding with MS counterparts but at the same time maintaining the simplicity of linux.
OPENGl (bindings) framework for the .Net and Mono has be recently been released by Tao. Here is the link
http://www.taoframework.com/.
Its pretty same for windows and linux bindings.
You can also get binding for python in mono called IronPython as well as ruby.
Mono is still yet to be mature and still requires lot of performance tuning but as far as F-spot and Evolution concerned we can definely see the future of gnome and openGL.
Do look at the link it is definetly an eye opener.
June 29th, 2007 at 8:10 am
Also take a look at the new silverlight clone that is a example of how rich can be these application both graphically as well as functionally. It would be a next level for linux programming.
I guess i saw one of your project look similar to Silverlight aka moonlight’s Surface project.
June 29th, 2007 at 10:29 am
@ blessmark: I know about the Tao framework. I tried it once and it was not offering much of what I wanted and what I was able to get from pure C. I just took a look at the site again and it seems they have worked quite a bit on the framework. Since they offer OpenGL 2.x support now, it might be worth to take another look at it. Well thanks for mentioning the python bit there… still don’t like it
The silverlight surface example is almost a 1:1 "copy" of my lowfat. I’m a little bit indifferent to that moonlight/silverlight show-case. I demoed lowfat to Miguel last year at guadec. BTW, at the evening of that same day I got a job-offer from him. That was quite a moment… it was hard to put that on a hold, because of university 
If you are at guadec this year you might want to listen to my talk on lowfat and my ideas about gnome 3.0/4.0.