Compiz On Pandora

[borgqueenx]

really enthousiastic for this one. I prefer plasma/compiz/whatever of all emulators and stuff.
Ofcource i also love those....but this...is the top!

I have always loved desktop effects. Cant give a real reason why, but i just love it.

 

[kloplop321]

It would make things look so smooth, like with changing workspaces, it would look smooth like the iPhone's selection screen

 

[dflemstr]

Xfce has its own compositing window manager, right? May not have all the fancy plugins like Compiz but it should enable at least a bit of eye candy, like transparency and shadows (assuming the graphics in the OMAP support it). I think e17 has more effects built-in.

XFCE's window manager uses aiglx too. Aka, won't work.

 

[borgqueenx]

It would make things look so smooth, like with changing workspaces, it would look smooth like the iPhone's selection screen

My 3gs is really smooth, but it has limits.
Smooth scrolling left/right, opening/closing apps...reordering has already large limitif you are not jailbroken.
Pandora smootheness with compiz/plasma cant be compared with pandora.

 

[conso]

It would make things look so smooth, like with changing workspaces, it would look smooth like the iPhone's selection screen

My 3gs is really smooth, but it has limits.
Smooth scrolling left/right, opening/closing apps...reordering has already large limitif you are not jailbroken.
Pandora smootheness with compiz/plasma cant be compared with pandora.

I don't get what you are saying here, still, compiz and plasma have nothing in common, don't / them.

We will probably see smooth animations in some launchers and probably also in applications. Smooth composition effects are something different. We might get them, we might not but definatly not with existing technology like a simple port of compiz.

 

[borgqueenx]

It would make things look so smooth, like with changing workspaces, it would look smooth like the iPhone's selection screen

My 3gs is really smooth, but it has limits.
Smooth scrolling left/right, opening/closing apps...reordering has already large limitif you are not jailbroken.
Pandora smootheness with compiz/plasma cant be compared with pandora.

I don't get what you are saying here, still, compiz and plasma have nothing in common, don't / them.

We will probably see smooth animations in some launchers and probably also in applications. Smooth composition effects are something different. We might get them, we might not but definatly not with existing technology like a simple port of compiz.

Im saying pandora will be much smoother and will have a higher sexyness number
ive watched both plasma and compiz on youtube...whats the difference?
And what's easier to port?

 

[conso]

plasma is the part of the kde software compilation responsible for the panel, the wallpaper and little google-gadget-like apps. It does hardly have anything to do with window managers. Compiz is a windowmanager. Highest hope for composition-effects on pandora is kwin, the kde window manager, since it's very modular and already offers at least 3 different backends for window-effects. Maybe one or two of those would already run on pandora, but those are NOT hardware-accellerated by design. Since the pandora is not a quad-core, we would need a backend that utilizes the sgx for hardware-accelleration and it is possible that people at nokia/qt/kde are already working on it behind closed doors.

 

[Wheels]

XFCE's window manager uses aiglx too. Aka, won't work.

D'oh!

 

[zhasha]

Let's clear things up a bit.
AIGLX aka. Accelerated Indirect GL for X:
It's an X server extension that allows a graphics driver to accelerate indirect GLX calls and thus have a GL application running server-side rather than client side. Normally when you draw you want to use Direct rendering and what happens there is when an application loads libGL.so, it will ask the DDX (2D X driver) what 3D driver to use, and load it. libGL will then effectively write directly to the graphics card. With indirect rendering, the GL calls are sent over a socket to the X server. Since compositing managers are run server-side and more or less hooks windowing calls, it makes sense to use indirect rendering.
Why don't we have it? because OpenGL ES is not OpenGL and thus we don't use GLX, nor do we use AIGLX.

Compositing (Compiz, KWin, Metacity, they can all do it):
Why do we want it? The X.org people have long been talking about having a "composited by default" environment. Why? Because compositing is both theoretically and practically faster than non-composited rendering. When using compositing in the X server, you can speedily move windows on the screen as what was once a painstaking amount of redrawing with a single buffer has been split up into many small buffers that don't need to be moved and can snappily be redrawn with the sheer awesome power that is the GPU. Even without a GPU, PCs are fast enough to do this with the CPU alone and still maintain a pretty smooth interface.
Remember when you tried Compiz on your PC a year ago using a radeon card and it just completely fucked up on all GL related things? That was a remnant of the old system that has luckily been completely eliminated by now (granted you have a KMS enabled kernel).

Plasma:
Now I've no idea why anyone would bring up plasma in this discussion but please tuck it away. Plasma is KDE's new way of making the experience a lot prettier, but it has nothing to do with compositing. All plasma is is a collection of widgets and widget-APIs stored in the form of HTML, CSS and some JS, exactly like Dashboard Widgets for OS X, with the API side being in JS, C and a couple of other languages. The plasma rendering takes place in WebKit and is then displayed onto the desktop rather like a canvas. The panel interoperates with the desktop which allows you to move the widgets between the two but plasma can render all its effects with or without compositing enabled.

What would be really cool:
If we could have a compositing manager with nothing but smoothing effects written specifically for OpenGL ES. The problem is we can't. Any compositing manager to achieve some sort of decent speed needs GLX 1.4 and AIGLX to render its content without duplicating an assload of things. So we're basically screwed. Also, the driver provided to us by TI is of course closed source, so we can't actually add this feature.

 

[hch]

is nanoGL really that slow? i thought extending openGL ES to full openGL in SW is a relatively easy task that has already be completed?

 

[hobbyman II]

as I understand it, these hooks allow you to almost talk directly to the hardware, but to do that you need an open driver, so you can insert the hooks, the onboard chipset on the Pandora does not have an open driver, so you can't go directly to the hardware, without being able to go to the hardware directly the compositing would be too slow, since you have to do things the GL way, rather than use optimised tricks to update desktop textures in realtime for eg.

you could write a interface that uses OpenGL, some sort of custom thing like the Iphone has, but it would basicly be an OpenGL application, so if you wanted to use OpenGL to any degree in the applications you use, you have to send your interface to sleep in order to free up OpenGL, that's prolly why the Iphone doesn't multitask applications (or at least I hear it doesn't, don't actually have one)