Beryl and Compiz to Merge

I'll be honest - I didn't see this one happening anytime soon, but alas, it is going to happen (and I suppose sooner is better than later.)

A while after Compiz and XGL's initial release as the enabler of crazy wobbly windows on Linux, some developers from the community didn't like David Reeveman's/Novell's slightly restricted (yet open source) development process that was occuring with Compiz. Personally, I thought Compiz's "I'll work on it for 9 months, not bother with releases, and end up with something amazing" development process worked pretty darn well - Before XGL, there were endless discussions about how to make OS X-like graphics a reality on Linux, none of which materialized into anything really usable. Instead of bickering about it (*cough* design by committee) for years, David decided to just do it. And he did it. And for a 0.1 release, Compiz was pretty damn good.

Can't argue with results.

However, some developers from the community who were getting involved with Compiz didn't like the way development looked like it was going to proceed, so they forked, giving us Beryl. Those developers worked on adding more crazy effects and in the short term took the focus away from stability, but within the last few months it seems like the developers efforts to stabilize Beryl have been successful. In the meantime, the Compiz team has also been plugging away and adding new features to Compiz as well.

This brings us to March 23, 2007, when QuinnStorm announced that Beryl will remerge with Compiz. It won't be easy for the teams to merge, but I think they both realize now that the long-term benefits of cooperation far outway the short-term setbacks that each team will incur.

Now that's progress.

Goodbye XGL, Goodbye AIGLX (Hello Xorg 7.1?)

Something awesome happened today.

NVIDIA released a beta of their new 1.0-9625 drivers. I'll just skip to the good part, as NVIDIA's James Jones explained it:

Neither Xgl or AIGLX are required to use compiz with the NVIDIA drivers now that they natively support GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap.

Xgl is an X server that renders using OpenGL and runs on top of another X server. It was the first X server available to support GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap.

AIGLX stands for Accelerated Indirect GLX. It is not related to compiz or GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap at all, except that support for GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap in the open source DRI OpenGL drivers required it. NVIDIA has always supported Accelerated Indirect GLX rendering.

NVIDIA supports both Direct AND Indirect rendering with the GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap extension. Users should not need to install any additional software to run compiz with new NVIDIA drivers. Please see the just-created sticky thread covering the basic setup steps.

That's right. These drivers feature hardware support for the mystical "GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap" extension, which now allows your videocard to accelerate your wobbly windows, among other things.

The catch? They require Xorg 7.1 or later. That means Ubuntu 6.06/Dapper Drake users are out of luck, unless they feel like compiling X from source (not such a good idea.) The good news is that Ubuntu 6.10/Edgy Eft features Xorg 7.1, so NVIDIA users will be able to benefit from this when Edgy is released (or if they're running Edgy already).

If you're using Xorg 7.1 and want to give it a shot, here's the sticky with instructions. (Also, this feedback thread might come in handy.)

Your move, ATI.

Update: A reader has pointed our that AIGLX has been merged into Xorg 7.1, and it's now enabled by default. So while it's not quite "goodbye" forever to AIGLX, you don't actually have to do anything manually to get it (and you shouldn't have to worry about it).

Compiz gets forked real good: Beryl

It was time. QuinnStorm (who maintained her own tree of compiz and provides awesome Ubuntu packages) has forked off Compiz into a new project, Beryl.

It's been clear for a while that QuinnStorm's version of Compiz has diverged from the simplicity present in the first release of Compiz. Quinn's tree has included all sorts of community developed plugins, most of which add shameless bling with little contribution to enhancing usability.

That's the difference as I see it: Novell's Compiz will continue to be a stable compromise between bling and usability, and Quinn's Beryl will become the community-driven bling-machine. And that's not to say that Beryl won't be stable, it's just that Novell puts more effort (and justifiably at that) into creating a top-notch user experience - Something that comes across as being an afterthought in Quinn's tree of Compiz.

At the very least, the next six months are going to bring us the answers to two important questions this fork has posed:
1. Will Beryl plugins remain compatible with Compiz? (mikedee from the Compiz forums asked this one)
2. When other distributions like Ubuntu add some sort of standard AIGLX/XGL support, will they offer Compiz or Beryl as the window manager of choice?

I honestly don't know the answers to either of these questions, but as development progresses, it'll certainly be interesting to find out. (In the meantime, follow this thread.)