I keep hearing rumors of Linux going the alpha windows route. Since we are testing thin client evaluation units, the research may need to follow another direction. Any truth to these rumors about alpha windows. I am concerned since alpha windows is archaic and was a disaster the first time around.
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Future of Linux Graphics
- Thread starter timsr
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Tim,<br><br>Sorry to sound stupid but -- What's Alpha Windows?<br><br> <p>Mike<br><a href=mailto:michael.j.lacey@ntlworld.com>michael.j.lacey@ntlworld.com</a><br><a href= Cargill's Corporate Web Site</a><br>Please -- Don't send me email questions without posting them in Tek-Tips as well. Better yet -- Post the question in Tek-Tips and send me a note saying "Have a look at so-and-so in the thingy forum would you?"
I see some people grousing about X Window System, but as far as I can tell from my limited vantage, X looks very healthy. One of the biggest complaints about X is that it is so massive because it tries to be all things to all people. I think the Linux community is commited to X: Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, Compaq and others have people assigned to and actively working at XFree86.<br><br>The commitment in X, at least at XFree86, is to continue to serve as wide a range of configurations as possible, both local and remote, so X Window setups typically have a large unused overhead. This is being addressed in X11R6 release 4, which is modularized so unneeded parts are no longer loaded. For some video boards and some applications Release 4 is still a bit rough around the edges, but development is rapidly cleaning these up and adding a lot of nice new stuff to make X leaner, cleaner and faster.<br><br>Did I answer your question? <p>Octalman<br><a href=mailto: > </a><br><a href= > </a><br>
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First, Mike,<br>It is not a stupid question, but you have to be an old fella like me to remember that alpha windows was a project to standardize window graphics. I failed miserably but does not want to die similar to DOS. <br><br>Second, Octalman,<br>It sounds like my fears may be unsubstantiated and I ccan continue with the research. Thanks for the input!<br><br>Tim
Just to back up what Octal was saying, I did some searching around last night, and XFree86 is looking more than healthy. There's some talk of "alpha channels" in X servers at the moment, but this is mostly related to WierdX, a Java based X server. It lets you do various things like transparent windows, but I can't really see much point in this. (Surely you want to see what's in the window? ;^)<br><br>XFree86 is alive and kicking, recently made a member of the X Consortium, and will be around for a long time I think.
I agree that probably what Timsr has been hearing relates to alpha channeling in X-windows. The point wasn't *transparent* windows but semi-transparent windows. While still not immensely useful, Enlightenment can do this so you can see what's under a window while you're dragging it.<br><br>One useful outcome of alpha channeling that comes to mind is the ability to view text in antialiased form on the desktop or in the browser. It could also be applied to VRML viewing. This has been supported on Windows for at least 3 or 4 years.<br> <br>Also, PNG, which is/should be the new standard for web and crossplatform graphics, supports alpha channeling, so why not make the move? This could open up the possibilities for a lot more freedom in GUI design and multimedia in X.
There is still divergance in graphics toolkits for X windows. MIT'S Athena is still around, but showing its age, and there are two new graphics toolkits, Qt by TrollTech and GNU's Gnome toolkit. There are some others and I think I recall seeing within the last week or so that someone was developing another (sigh).At least TrollTech and GNU are cooperating to try to keep theirs as mutually compatible as possible. I haven't looked at The Gimp (part of the Gnome stuff), but a lot of people like it. If you have lots of disk space, I think all of these will work on any X Windows setup, provided you have the toolkit installed for whichever one you need. You can have Athena, Qt and Gtk all installed at the same time. Dunno about others. <p>Octalman<br><a href=mailto: > </a><br><a href= > </a><br>
Yup - you can definitely have all three installed at the same time. I also saw somewhere that someone has proposed a convergence of the GTK and QT (Gnome and KDE respectively) toolkits to make programming for third parties easier.<br><br>In my experience, as long as you've got the right widget libraries installed, you can run all 3 at once. (In fact, it's what I do every day.)<br><br>On the Alpha channel front, I've seen somewhere that the latest release (1.2) of Gnome has improved Alpha channelling built in to it. Note that this is seperate from the X server, and is a feature of the Gnome toolkit/libraries.<br><br>There's also a new standard window manager been proposed by the Gnome guys to "replace" Enlightenment as the "standard" Gnome based WM.<br><br>The end result of all this? XFree86 is still (and probably always will be) the foundations that all of this stuff is built on. Alpha channels and so forth will be built into the widget libraries provided by other parties, and we can pick and choose exactly what we want for our desktop. Sounds good to me 
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