New GUI for Linux Depends on Open Video Drivers
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Is Linux ready for a makeover? Windows Vista and OS X have been showing off new 3D interfaces lately. Linux shouldn’t be left behind, so Novell is preparing to improve and accelerate graphics eyecandy in Linux. But they’ll have to solve a heated argument between the Free Software Foundation and video card makers Nvidia and ATI.
Novell’s XGL to Improve the GUI
Microsoft and Apple are both showing off new drop shadows and 3D effects in their recent operating systems. Maybe productivity is becoming secondary to rippling water effects, but the impetus has crossed into the open source communities developing Linux.
Novell, makers of SUSE Linux, have release source code for a graphical project called XGL (http://www.novell.com/linux/xglrelease/). It uses accelerated graphics cards to make the Linux GUI a little smoother. It adds things such as drop shadows on windows, transparency, and zooming windows. A lot of these effects have been established in other operating systems, but releasing the XGL framework grants programmers a chance to introduce new innovations with it.
The picture above shows Gnome taking advantage of drop shadows and transparency thanks to XGL. The new makeover for the Linux interface also makes minimizing windows look more like the window is actually shrinking down into the taskbar; it may be just a visual detail, but it might help less tech savvy people. While the framework right now is primarily good for making things look better and smoother, there are a few functional improvements too.
Using the existing idea of multiple desktops, XGL gives users a way to visualize changing them. It can map each desktop to the face of a cube and rotate between them when switching.
Being able to use graphic hardware fully also gives the operating system more resources to work with. Using XGL, developers can store the contents of hidden windows and minimized windows in the graphic card’s memory. Then, when those windows are resized back into the foreground, they can be immediately filled instead of having to wait for the information in them to be retrieved.
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