Accuse me of blogspam and whatnot, but I saw this, it was really cool and I thought I just /had/ to share it with you.

Yes, I’m talking about that UI mockup on the front page of reddit today. Some of the stuff I saw there just made me think “Why isn’t some of the stuff there already in compiz today?”.

Granted, most of the effects show in the video are already in compiz (such as wobbly, dodge, etc) but it was the 2 at the end that got me. The first is where the user drags the window onto the taskbar and it minimizes. Makes. So. Much. Damn. Sense. Why have I been wasting so much time trying to reach for a little button on the window decoration when all that time I could have just used fitts law as we already do with the launcher menu, hotcorners etc to minimize windows. Why? The same concept is (rather neatly) applied to the workspace switcher as well.

This could all work out in the panel interface I’ve been thinking of but not really acting on at the moment. Sigh – internets, plz give me some developers to help me with this. kthx.

So I had a rather unfortunate event over the past two weeks. Upgraded my kernel – no matching kernel sources, boot up, dkms dies, fsck dies and my file system table gets trashed in the process. Fun.

/Thankfully/ I had just gotten around to installing rsync on my server and had run a few backups by that time so I didn’t loose much that was important. I just had the issue of no linux system and I honestly can’t be bothered to wipe this machine and re-install all four operating systems because I don’t really have the time to. So I’ve been trying things out in VirtualBox on Vista (which I haven’t booted into for about 4 months now). Suprisingly, it’s quite stable if I don’t mess with it and are careful about what you do, although I have noticed in the two weeks I’ve been using it performance has degraded somewhat.

Anyways, openSUSE isn’t really heading in a direction that suits me anymore – no plymouth, no KMS, no DRI2 are geared up for 11.2 and fighting some of the stuff that comes with it is starting to become a pain. If you don’t want to mess around too much though, openSUSE is a great distro – I recommend it over Ubuntu, it’s just my interests have changed.

I noticed that most of the awesome X Devs like Peter Hutterer and Kristian Hoegsberg (and let’s not forget Linus Himself!) are using Fedora, and I’ve heard it’s geared towards developers (being bleeding edge and all) – and I guess I’m not ready to delve into the DIY distro territory of Gentoo and Arch.

I’ve always craved this GDM setup – simple and functional. If I recall correctly, openSUSE has it now too.

I also want to try to move back to KDE as well because it has some pretty cool things coming up for it. Although, I’m finding it difficult somewhat.

Fedora also has nice support for other DE’s as well like XFCE and LXDE which I am also considering. (Although XFCE lacks support for gvfs…)

Surprisingly Compiz works under VirtualBox while running under Windows which is quite a testament to how far both open source software but also Virtualization software has come today. It runs at quite a decent framerate (120fps), there is support for ARB_fragment_program and it quite usable. The only glitch I’ve noticed so far is opacity related where blending does not occur properly. Oh well.

In the Compiz 0.9 development department I’ve been silently working on the Thumbnail plugin. It’s actually been quite a job considering the way it works and I’m also adding a few well deserved features like setting a thumbnail region hint (Sadly no EMWH spec for this yet, so I am doing it both for KDE and genericly), so that you can peek windows you have hovered the thumbnail over. Also, I should probably write an Aero Snaps-eqsue plugin so that Windows 7 doesn’t have anything on us on day one .

I’ll probably re-install my system in about 2 weeks during school break and during that time I should be able to do some compiz related work.

-Sm

Can come so close to home.

I should probably take my books home – at this rate I will soon be quarantined.

Kazzap!

Activity!

Woo!

Compiz Related Stuff:

Elements(++/0.9):

[DEBUG] * Plugin 'elements' successfully loaded!
init function called
PrivateElementScreen  constructor call!

Sam@XPS-SUSE:~/.compiz/options> PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/compiz/lib/pkgconfig pkg-config --modversion compiz
# 0.9.0

I’m quite glad to say that compiz isn’t dead! Far from it! One of my bigger plugins, elements, has finally been ported, after sorting through about 500 unique compile errors in the past week. Unfortunately, while it is ported and it loads, it isn’t really finished yet as I can’t get a config file for it from the ini plugin. And besides that, even if I were, I’d have to use CCSM for most of the multi-list stuff and … well, that’s going to take me a while to sort out and get working with my own install. So, it’s ported and I’ll probably come back and finish it later =)

You can get it at:

git://git.compiz.org/compiz/plugins/elements

I’m probably going to start porting other smaller plugins while I’ve stuff got spare time.

CompizShell?

I was thinking about how I might implement this, and hopefully if I can get MacSlow’s RGBA-GLX code working the way I want, then I should be able to draw a fullscreen window for the panel that will smothly resize and use XShape to handle input.

Hopefully, a minimalistic implementation should be enough for compiz users who want to use compiz with future gnome version.

Real Life Related Stuff:

Evatt

So my partner and I won the 2009 UNYA Hammaskjold Trophy Competition (Model United Nations Debating), so we’re off to the 2009 Evatt Trophy Competition later in December! Whee!

Also, I’ve heard tentative news that one of my friends has been selected for the final 4 WADL State Team, which is just awesome!

.eu

It was awesome of course. Germany, France, Poland. Nuff said.

Exams

Yay, they’re over! FreeTime++!

XBMC

I also managed to rebuild a server out of spare parts on junk collection day. So far, although the average age is about 7~ years, it’s pretty awesome!, It’s got a 10 year old HDD (10GB at 5200RPM IDE), DVD Burner at 2x (Woo!), P4 2.4GHz, ATI Radeon 9850 (R300, which is supported by both KMS and DRI2), a truckload of USB bays and an ASUS MyCinema Europa for TV. And the motherboard is a Foxconn which came with the CPU. It’s plugged into my TV and acts as a full-on HTPC and it’s got the XBMC-PVR-VDR patch applied so I can watch TV. I should really do a review of XBMC one day, it’s just plain awesome. Runs Ubuntu 9.04 like a fox.

-Sm

A while back I said a few (looking back on it, rather harsh) words about gnome-shell. I’ve probably miscommunicated what I was trying to say with regards to that situation.

First of all, such comments are (roughly) my own opinion and my stance has changed to be a bit more neutral since then – of course with the status quo and the way GNOME-Shell is written, it would be difficult to make it WM-agnostic as it is now. Looking at the code the job may be a little harder than I thought. Of course, it’s important to note that though I am a member of the compiz council (an ill fitted one at times), usually my comments don’t represent the entire view of the compiz project (even though it might look like it).

Secondly, I get the impression that people are starting to think GNOME is some kind of evil project. They’re really not – and I think GNOME-Shell has a lot of merit to it and is certainly a step in the right direction for bringing a composited desktop to the masses.

The only concerns that I had outlined with it was that it integrated the panel with the window manager. This has it’s merits and can make things a lot easier, but also means that if you were to start another window manager (i.e compiz) you would lose your panel. There are replacements for the panel (like AWN, Kiba) but for people who like the normal panel (like me), this isn’t the best scenario.

I guess the best thing to do now is to let matters cool down and cross the bridge of the issue of the panel when we get to it.

So please – don’t turn this into some kind of holy war, because it really isn’t. I always try to live by the rule ‘Assume best intentions’ i.e people aren’t evil for the sake of being evil – there is always some good intent in actions. The shell issue will sort it self out, it’s just one of the many little things that should probably be addressed in the future.

“I think the Compiz guys and girls need to work hard on making ccsm more accessible, in such a way that it doesn’t require a degree in physics and geometry to figure out how it works.” -OSNews

In terms of CCSM, such a comment has always troubled me. Apart from graphical glitches and ‘pointless bling’, CCSM seems to be one of the main areas compiz is seen as ‘weak’. Of course, there is a point to which we need to know – are we doing it wrong, and what can we do to fix it.

A lot of the comments on CCSM come down to it’s sharp learning curve and learning the plugin-based configuration and not feature based.

Anyways, considering that we’ve been using CCSM for ages, all the developers find it incredibly easy – but we acknowledge that perhaps it is not as simple for newer users. So my question is this – what can we do to improve CCSM’s usability. What would make it make more sense? You are free to make any suggestions, however the only restriction we have so far is that it needs to be flexible over multiple plugins – i.e it should be consistent for every plugin as every plugin has it’s own metadata.

-Sm

(On a side note, I thought I might share with you that my partner and I were selected to train with on the Western Australian Debating Legue State Squad of 2009, a prestigious recognition and certainly a fufillment of a long-term goal for myself)

Edit: Thanks for all the feedback, as far as I can see these are some of the things that need to be done (and are doable)

• Remove plugin-centric view – make it feature centric (as best as possible) instead: I.e. for ‘cube’ just have ‘cube’ then everything that depends on it can be put inside the ‘cube’ page or group all the switchers into one? (Or make them plugin-plugins). Where this would really work is animation and elements – that way we can really separate it out into ‘engine’ plugins and have them all under animation/elements respectively.
• Do something about window matching – make the match editor more obvious?
• This wasn’t brought up,  but probably something done about actions – the same option  shouldn’t really repeat itself 3 times if it was to be triggered with a key, button and edge. All the bindings buttons should be one option for each actual option.
• Add launchers for simple/medium CCSM
• More GNOME-HIGness i.e not having close where back is.

Hi everyone.

Hope you didn’t mind my obnoxious April Fools joke yesterday, it was just an idea myself and racarr threw around in IRC :p.

Anyways, this post is about Compiz 0.9.x (formerly ‘compiz++’). Compiz 0.9.x started in december when onestone announced his core rewrite on the mailing list. It had features like pluggable output backends, written in c++ (and a few nice interfaces that came with it) and other misc bits and pieces. It was designed mostly in mind to overcome a lot of the design problems we were having, like plugin-plugins and a ridiculous amound of code to manage lists. In Janurary, some developers started to toy around with it and at the beginning of this February, we announced that compiz++ would become the base for the 0.9.x series and the 0.9.x series would features some major reworks. We’ve all been quite busy during that time – so we’ve done whatever possible to push the branch forwards.

Where are we now?

Currently, we are in the process of porting plugins to the 0.9.x branch. If you’ve observing cgit you might see ‘compiz++’ branches pop up in various plugins. This is where all the work is being done. Currently (off the top of my head) we’ve ported quite a number of plugins (about 1/3 of them), with significant ones being scale, switcher, text, mousepoll, wall, expo. There has been some other work than porting plugins of course – we’ve had to change quite a few things in core to make things work. Some of the bigger stuff that has happened recently though is that onestone made significant changes to the buildsystem – you probably know that we are using CMake instead of autotools now, so building compiz is quite different. Some of the new features include a nice color and progress bar for building core and plugins – no more random make output nobody can read. It also allows for more flexible building of plugins – there is a sample CMakeLists.txt that you can drop into a dir and it will generate the files needed to build all the plugins in that dir for example. BCOP has now also been merged into core, so the options system is unified. Not really a user thing, but significant nonetheless.

Where to from here?

Well, the bad news is that we still have a significant amount of work to do if we want the 0.9.x branch to be usable for anybody. Big plugins still haven’t been ported – such as cube and it’s addons, group/tab, wobbly, animation, elements etc. Most of the big plugins will be completely rewritten anyways (as animation is). We still have some big plans for 0.9.x, those include:

• Doing something about gnome-shell. GNOME-Shell is a tricky issue for us because it integrates the window manager with the panel (or at least loads the panel as a plugin to the window manager). This basically means that if you launch compiz in future GNOME versions, you lose your panel. KDE sort of has a similar issue, in that the desktop is tied in with the panel, but that makes sense anyways because there aren’t really any other desktop shells that are designed to replace the default desktop (other than SpringDesk of course, but that is on hold ATM and would probably have a panel of it’s own). I already made a post to the GNOME-desktop-devel about this, but they have told me that tight integration is needed between the panel and the window manger so that the ‘overview’ mode can be done correctly (which I disagree with, you could just have shell expose it’s drawing handle and register functions in the WM (or it’s plugins) that would do the overlay mode for you). Unfortunately, their view on this is that ‘people want it to Just Work (TM) and don’t really care about other window managers’, hence locking out compiz from GNOME. Yeah, inter-project co-operation. It sucks. We basically have two options – fork / rewrite shell and maintain it for compiz (and allow it to be compatible with it’s own set of extensions), which we can’t do with the amount of developers we have or convince the GNOME folks to turn shell into a lib that can easily be used with other WM’s.
• Options rework: Our options system has been quite inflexible for a long time and we are denying more and more requests because we can’t configure such with our current settings infrastructure. The options rework would probably allow things like
  • Lists in lists
  • ‘Suboptions’, ie depending on what another option is, another few options can appear related to that option. This would be particularly useful with elements and animation, where you can only configure the entire effect and not on a per-entry basis (without having to look up option names and syntax etc).
  • A pluggable CCSM ‘hints’ system where plugins that require more complex configuration would store the option in a string, but the option would have hint = foo, and the CCSM plugin would allow you to configure that in a more sensible way than editing a string. Think mousegestures editor, multiple color selector for wallpaper, etc.
• Merge NOMAD. Self explanitory, but the NOMAD branch should probably be merged
• MPX Support. Self explanitory
• Input Redirection: We’ll make a big push along with the KWin, Compiz, and Mutter guys, we really need this.

So that will probably give you an outlook on how things are going to go for the 0.9.x branch. Although you’ll need to be patient. All of the developers have really demanding Real Lives (TM) at this time and don’t have as much time as they used to to work on compiz. 0.9 might be ready within the next two months, or the next six months depending on how things go. We’ll keep you informed.

EDIT: By the way, note that these ideas are mostly tentative – depending on a number of factors they may or may not happen. GNOME-Shell is an especially tricky issue and it would be wise for us to see what happens with it.

- Sm

At Compiz, we have a very important announcement to make:

Forget MPXIR

Forget Compiz++

Forget NOMAD

Forget every other thing we have been working on.

Something better has been in the works for a long time. Something you would never notice unless you were a dev yourself. Something will see the light of day once again for 2 years. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you:

Yeah, we all know you have wanted it

BERYL 0.2.1.0.0.0.0.0.1!!!!!!!!

We know. Compiz development has been slow. It seems we are being outpaced by other projects. But now we take the lead once again from the ashes of the glory-days. Beryl has been developed under secret wraps until now – right at home with git://git.compiz.org/inactive/beryl. We modified gitweb and cgit to not show any commit activity, because we knew nobody cared about Beryl. Well you were wrong! Beryl has been unleashed to take over the world from KWin and Shell busting features like:

• Allowing you to send IMAP and POP email from the titlebar – take that metacity
• It has t3h spinnan cubez!! and aslo t3h woobly windowz!
• It doesn’t require OpenGL to operate anymore. In fact, it doesn’t even use OpenGL anymore. OpenGL only allows for drawing in 3 dimentions (plus the fourth for time). Well we use ALL EIGHT. Our RnD team took a long time to get to that one. Makes you think twice before posting a feature request eh?
• Using our new FROG (Feature Request Auto Grant) system, Beryl will auto-detect when you post in the feature requests forum and grant that wish for you. Yes. ANY WISH. *
• Violating all laws of physics – we have have implemented some features people have long wanted
  • Input Redirection: When you click on a transformed pixel on your screen, Beryl BECOME your kernel and force, due to the fact that it is a higher process hierarchy than X.org, X.org to put that input in the right place. Don’t open up your system, it gets really ugly in there when this happens…
  • Thumbnails of minimized windows: When a window is minimized, Beryl captures it before it flees to the taskbar. When you hover the taskbar, the window will appear in REAL TIME and cry out for help. The window is released with an NDA about it’s encounter when you ‘unminimize’ it
  • By copying some unknown patents from microsoft, we are able to make the icons displayed in, shift, stackswitch, ring, switcher and staticswitcher less fugly. The icons used to render from WNCK at 32×32. We can boost the quality of this rendered image to 32.5×32.5 and because of this, we can display it at twice the size. Yes people – the difference between 1/3 and 1/2 is the same as the difference between 1/5 and 1/4. I had this sudden realization during physics and handed in a fail test because of it.
  • OMG WE HAVE DESKTOPS ON TOP OF THE CUBE NOW!!!!!!!
• Due to our advanced technology, Beryl now only runs on TomTom OS. Right now, TomTom is being sued out of existance, so it runs on nothing in reality
• Fixed a damage bug present from the 1.x days
• Fixed the black window bug with nvidia
• Fixed general ati fail
• Forced intel hardware to do shaders right
• Adjusted the perambulic merimbulator
• Megatronized the gigapixel shared arithmatic megaprocessor RAM unit

Developers:

Guess what – you have to rewrite your plugins AGAIN! But don’t worry, we picked a really nice language – LOLCODE. I’m sure you’ll have fun.

* Be careful what you wish for

If you haven’t seen the announcement on the forum already, you should probably be aware that the support and web teams will be carrying out a forum rework on March 2nd 0200 GMT. The main reasons for this were the fact that current forum structure doesn’t fit well with our user base and doesn’t promote much community involvement. With the new forum structure, we hope this will change.

There will be a bit of weirdness as we move stuff around, so I wouldn’t advise posting for a few hours around that time (most of our users will be asleep [or should be!] anyways, so this shouldn’t be too much of a problem).

Also, if something is not working or things are in the wrong place, feel free to report that thread to the moderators. I usually act upon reports from the forum on-the-day.

The announcement can be found here

Update: It’s been delayed a bit because of some things we had to work out. The forum is in read-only mode for the moment and will be ready in a day or two. Stay tuned!

Update 2: Work has started. Please hold.

Update 3: It’s done! See the announcement for details and over the next few days, don’t post unless you absolutely need to as there is a slight chance we may have to revert to previous backups and we’ll lose your posts!

- Sm

So considering that compiz++ is now master and my patches haven’t been maintained in a while, a lot of you might be wondering what is going on with input redirection and MPX. Was that effort wasted? Is it made obsolete by com[iz++? Is it still doable? When is it coming? Etc.

To be perfectly honest, they are all questions in a sea of uncertainty. Surely, it has been on the top of our priority list and the compiz developers would love to see it working out. I can say that MPX support is on our TODO list before 1.0, and considering that there already patches to implement this functionality (even if it was badly and with problems), we will be considering this once core settles down (compiz++ ports, NOMAD, options-rework etc).

A large part of that framework will probably be generic input events, i.e plugins do not need to handle X events directly, compiz core can do all the annoying work and plugins get all the commonly used data in a nice neat package (like how we have implemented actions, but to a greater level). This is important because X Input 2 events have different signatures to normal X Events which means that you have to write event handling code twice (not good).

As for input redirection, it’s still up in the air. The current X patches are currently in a nice state: only a small hook has to be added the X server to transform input event co-ordinates by a triangular mesh with XComposite. The only problems with this approach is that some broken apps read global event co-ordinates instead of their own which breaks the way input redirection works and so far it has been difficult to calculate a triangle mesh for different effects. Our math and openGL guru – onestone, suggested a more efficient way of calculating a triangle mesh or all different kinds of effects: hopefully this can be implemented in the next revision of the input redirection work.

I would imagine that around the time we implement support for MPX, we will also do a big push on the XServer side of things to get input redirection (re)-implemented. Hopefully, that should all work out if we show that we are serious about it.

NOMAD:

During the last conference call I had the oppurtunity to speak with David Reveman regarding input redirection and NOMAD. I asked him if it was possible to do such and also how NOMAD would be implemented so it was transparent.

The idea behind NOMAD is have your session running on some remote server and send as little data as possible to have the client do the grunt rendering work. NOMAD allows for so-called ‘virtual’ channels over RDP where data can be sent to client applications to be done on the client itself. This is essentially moving away from the idea that remote desktop is just sending input events to some server and have it return screenshots of it’s display or a buffer. Ideally, for NOMAD to work seamlessly, you just send the data required to rendering GLX applications or video and the rendering is done on the client itself. This would be with nil speed loss if the client machine was the server. Compiz does this already: server compiz sends the client compiz window pixmap data and voila, desktop effects are hardware accellerated by the client.

The idea of all this is that when you log in, you spawn a remote session that you can’t see in reality and your visible session is actually connecting to that remote session on that same machine. Then, you can just resume that session from anywhere you want. Especially useful if you have a USB key and just plug it into someone’s machine. The difference between your remote session and local session should be unnoticeable.

Why is this important for input redirection? Remember that because we are sending events to a server session, we have access to all the input events. This is crucial if you want to input redirection. It also requires no X Server modifications, just a different setup. Of course, if the actual patches for X were accepted that would be better, but this would work just as well.

I hope that clarifies any confusion about the state of Input Redirection, MPX and NOMAD. I’ve had a lot of questions regarding it recently.