Finally, FBOs on intel
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.
September 20th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
Fantastic! Though this doesn’t add new features or productivity-enhancing, it really looks super slick.
I would *really* love to see the desktop blur effect added when a password is requested, like you demonstrated at 0:54 in the clip.
September 20th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
“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):”
Aaah! Most awkward sentence structure ever!
September 20th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
No gnome-globalmenu? Well, at least you took a hex editor to your compiz binaries.
September 20th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
Hi Mirco,
What about Lowfat current status?
September 20th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
@ MadsRH: Did you read the whole blog-post? I’ve uploaded that to my PPA. You can extract the relevant patch from this, if you want it in a stand-alone form. Here you go: https://edge.launchpad.net/~macslow/+archive/ppa/+files/libgksu_2.0.12-1ubuntu5.diff.gz
@ Bob: Nah… I’ve seen (and done *g*) worse.
@ Not using it yet. I might try the global menu later. I did not use a hex-editor for the plugin-patch. Patching via hex-editor would make it really difficult to adjust the patch once compiz-fusion-plugins-main gets an update. It’s a normal text-diff against one of the XML-files and a C-file. You can take a look here: https://edge.launchpad.net/~macslow/+archive/ppa/+files/compiz-fusion-plugins-main_0.8.3+git20090914-0ubuntu3.diff.gz
September 20th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
@ jose: Idle still.
September 20th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
I have not had the same success with my drivers. Under fedora 11 I had dri2 and kms enabled but on karmic its disabled and I cant seem to enable it(ati mobility x1400 by the way)..
Makes trying to hack with clutter incredibly frustrating as I need to switch the compositor off before hacking each time.
On an unrelated note, you seemed to have experimented with different techniques for trimming video a long time ago.. I want to achieve a similar trim, would cairo be the best option?
September 20th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
@ mrmcq2u: Hm, I’m not sure which Rx00 GPU the Mobility X1400 actually is. I only my ways around the i915 and i965 on the FOSS side for drivers and nvidia (6800GT, 7900GT, 8800GT) on the proprietary side. “trimming video”?! You mean this perhaps: http://macslow.net/?p=127 and http://macslow.net/?p=132 ? I use cairo to draw me the trimming mask, but the reall work of masking out the edge of an image of video is always done with OpenGL via multi-texturing.
September 20th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
[...] At last, a bit more eye-candy is now possible on i965-based systems: http://macslow.net/?p=386 [...]
September 20th, 2009 at 9:39 pm
I want you shiny media-player
Looks great, but all posts related are 2years+ old..
September 20th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
Hello macslow.
I am from the cairo-dock project
Have you seen the cairo-dock project they have got transformed your initial work on cairo on now a full opengl dock unforunately only intel drivers doesn’t display opengl correctly. They have set up a weekly ppa https://launchpad.net/cairo-dock for testing with weekly updates. I would be happy if someone who nows opengl and intel drivers could have a deep look and tell us if that could be fix before karmic.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/cairo-dock-core/+bug/428900
Thank you so much for your work for improving the state of free software.
September 20th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
@ macslow does clutter offer any similar way of masking out the edge?
With regards to the ati issue, I was trying to fix it with a helpful guy on #radeon all day. It seems that the xserver is mis-communicating with libdrm-radeon1 on boot. It says its compatible but something gets lost in translation. Apparently the bug is fixed upstream and I tried out xorg edgers ppa and now its working perfect
The ati stuff currently in karmic is pretty broken, I think that they should pull in the latest release from xorg edgers and use that instead. Maybe try enabling dri2 by default after and see if the issues where there before crop up again then disable it for stable release.
I think that dri2 should be on by default though, I was beginning to ponder switching to fedora just to make things easier by having working dri2 when I was loosing hope. Its not just people with osd that get annoyed with needing to disable compiz to have things render correctly
September 21st, 2009 at 1:42 am
@ mrmcq2u: So far clutter 1.0 does not expose access to the texture-units offered by OpenGL. There’s only one (unit 0) available. Thus you’re currently not able to replicate the “masking out” using just clutter, or its lower level foundation cogl.
September 21st, 2009 at 1:47 am
@ Taiebot: You’re on an i945. That could be the main issue. As far as I remember, intel only pours resources into developing and maintaining the driver for i965 and greater. I no longer have access to an i945-based system, so I can’t test it myself here. BTW, I don’t see this bug - demonstrated in the screencast attached to the bug-report - on my i965-based laptop here.
September 21st, 2009 at 4:04 am
Awesome! Thanks for the heads up. I wanted to have a good blur effect not eating all my cpu. If there are people outside that think having a good desktop with good visuals, this kind of this makes the people see with other eyes on the linux desktop (plus the pleasure to enjoy it while you work with it).
I really really look forward to use it on karmic very soon
September 21st, 2009 at 7:29 am
Argh… I have Intel GMA 945 on my tablet PC … and was looking forward to OpenGL 2.0 support if I could use Blender’s GLSL feature, which require OpenGL 2.0 compatible video card :\
September 21st, 2009 at 11:04 am
@ Dread Knight: If you want to seriously use blender, you should not even bother with an i945. Get a decent mid-range card (~ €100) with a GPU from nvidia or ATI. If you’re stuck with the i945, because it’s soldered into your laptop, you’re out of luck. IGPs really test your patience in terms of responsiveness when working with a 3D app like blender.
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:55 am
Its much faster to type “glxinfo | grep OpenGL” than it is to write “glxinfo | grep “OpenGL Renderer”" yet it gives the same result.
February 19th, 2010 at 12:28 pm
hi
i have a graphic card intel gma4500hd on this video card there is pixel shaders..on my laptop with driver mesa 7.7 and xf86-video-intel 2.10 only blur 4xbilinear works .. I want to use the Gaussian does not work .. why?
February 19th, 2010 at 1:10 pm
yiunix: I’ve no clue. You got to ask that intel. Here you can see how to report bugs to them http://intellinuxgraphics.org/how_to_report_bug.html