Wednesday 7 May 2008

5Dwm v2.0

Hi all,

I am glad to announce the start of the development effort of 5Dwm v2.0. On the road map are the addition of EWMH 1.x support, XRender and hardware overlay plane. Here are below a little bit more details on what those new features means and how this will improve 5Dwm functionality and usability.

Enhanced Window Manager Hints or EWMH is a specification that defines interactions between a window manager, the applications that it manage, and utilities that form part of a desktop experience. These new features will allow 5Dwm v2.0 to support multiple workspaces, a pager, sticky and shaded windows. Refer to the official documentation for more detail: http://standards.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-1.3.html

XRender is on the other hand a very nice addition to 5Dwm and it will guaranty a smooth evolution and provide advanced rendering operations, alpha blending and composition support. XRender will bring to 5Dwm v2.0 a fresh touch of modernization and support transparent window, setting the stage for drop shadows and composition-manager like xcompmgr and Compiz-Fusion. OpenGL application that supports ARGB-GLX Visual will also benefits for XRender support. Here is a very nice example of what ARGB GLX Visual and XRender can do: http://macslow.thepimp.net/?p=41

Hardware Overlay Plane is a feature that is only available on workstation and pro-level GPU card like the NVidia Quadro line, 3DLabs and FireGL. In a nutshell it provide a hardware accelerated second plane, above the main plane that we all know, for drawing whatever you want. The idea is to avoid expensive window redraw when popup menus, feedbacks and other GUI elements are displayed to get user inputs. The less often you redraw the better your application behave. The plan is to add into 5Dwm v2.0 hardware overlay plane support to assist and off load CAD/CAM, digital effects and imaging softwares. SGI's 4DWM as been using hardware overlay plane for almost 10years now. This feature deserve to be used rather that forgotten. Trolltech's Qt 4.x supports overlay plane right at the QWidget and QGLWidget level, when the hardware supports it, of course!

Finally, 5Dwm v2.0 will be linked against SGI-OpenMotif-2.3. That's right! OpenMotif 2.3 is getting SGI look and feel and enhancements. As of today, 50% of the work is done and I can tell you that SGI-Motif 2.3 never looked so good with XFT antialiased fonts.

Hope this gets you excited, cause I am and looking forward your comments and feedbacks.

Eric Masson

5Dwm.org|| MaXXDesktop.com

3 comments:

mlk said...

Good work!!!

Thank you!!!!

Anonymous said...

Release that puppy. Beta is a state of mind :)

peak said...

It seems like the lighttpd in unmaintained.

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://macslow.thepimp.net

ping 85.114.130.207
PING 85.114.130.207 (85.114.130.207) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 85.114.130.207: icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=18.0 ms
64 bytes from 85.114.130.207: icmp_seq=2 ttl=53 time=19.0 ms

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://macslow.thepimp.net/?p=41

0 pages found for http://macslow.thepimp.net/?p=41
Sorry, no matches.

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