Kororaa Releases XGL LiveCD

Tony Tony Chopper writes "The team from Kororaa who brought us a GUI based Gentoo installer have just released the first live CD to use xgl technology. From Kororaa.org, the lead developer Chris writes 'Today I am happy to release a Kororaa Live CD showcasing Xgl technology.' The response so far have been incredibly positive, an article at tuxmachines.org is glowing with much praise and few complaints. For those who love eye-candy but don't want to mess with their existing installs, this is the perfect opportunity to see what Xgl is about. The torrent can be downloaded from LinuxTracker."

Mirrors.

[xbmodder]

The main site is down for some reason (slashdot does that). The torrent is mirrored at: http://mirrors.atarack.com/Kororaa-Xgl-Live-CD-0.1 .torrent [atarack.com] We have ISO mirrors here for the impatient: [softpedia.com] (thanks to softpedia [softpedia.com])
here [rdt1.org] (thanks to rdt1.org [rdt1.org])
here [mudrii.ath.cx] (thanks to Mudrii)
here [hotel-peter.net] (thanks to Hotel Peter [hotel-peter.net])
here [overconfident.org] (thanks to Over Confident) [overconfident.org]
here [bytemark.co.uk] (thanks to sefcom [sefcom.nl])
here [digitalextortion.com] (thanks to Digital Extortion) [digitalextortion.com], and
here [snipanet.com] (thanks to Chris Peters from Canada)
here [atarack.com] (Atarack VDS/VPSes who are our proud sponsors) [atarack.com]
(To buy an atarack VPS e-mail us at [e-mail] or at [e-mail])

Re:zomg, sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

"Well the graphics are cool, but does it actually increase how useable my computer is?"
Yes. Of course not automatically, but it does provide a technical means that makes things possible that will increase usability. Take the expose like feature, or live previews when alt-tabbing, for example. And will of course make implementing accessibility (sp?) like zooming much easier to implement.

"Not to mention the obivous questions like "will my crappy integrated graphics card even come close to running this?""
I think one of the best things about XGL (and AIGLX for that matter) is that the hardware requirements for this are actually pretty low. So if you integrated graphic chip does do opengl, it should work.
Of course keep in mind that this thing is still in beta and that many drivers still lack the opengl extensions needed, so that many things that later will be done in hardware are now actually done with mesa in software.
That said, despite these problems, XGL runs very smooth on my quite old and not very powerful Geforce.

Re:Some thoughts.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bilinear filtering. When the window is being displayed at it's original size and shape, the filtering artifacts disappear.

Re:Hardware requirements?

[dajobi]

http://en.opensuse.org/Xgl [opensuse.org] http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_XGL#Prerequisites [gentoo-wiki.com]

Re:Why a LiveCD?

[Chris Pimlott]

* Because some people still have USB 1.0
* Because not everyone can boot from USB
* Because practically everyone has a CD drive
* Because it's easier to boot from a CD
* Because it's a lot cheaper to give your friend a CD than a thumb drive

Don't buy the anti-Xgl FUD, check it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

MountainMan, do yourself a favour and look into the background to this Xgl vs Aiglx thing yourself, because things are not as they have been presented by Fedora. Not by a mile.

Xgl development is being done highly cooperatively and has been so for many months --- it's all there in the mailing list, for anyone who wants to check the evidence. The business hand of Novell is nowhere to be seen, so all this talk of "proprietary" is the sheerest nonsense, especially since Novell owns SuSE. And on top of that, Xgl is not a replacement for X, but merely another X server which you could run alongside your standard one but on a different VT.

And then there's the "AIGLX is the same X server" nonsense that's coming out of Fedora. It's not, it's a different X server altogether but with code derived from the standard one. It would replace your existing X server, exactly like Xgl does. Plus, Aiglx is totally unusable by 99% of the population since it only supports the fully open drivers currently, so general support is pure vapourware at this time. And to cap it all, Xgl is being labelled as "proprietary" and "developed behind closed doors" when actually it's the other way around --- there has been no open development of Aixgl whatsoever, instead it's been a closed-door development between Fedora and the highly proprietary nVidia, with no public community input.

So you see, things are not at all as they have been portrayed.

I'm not sure why, but there's some monkey business going on here, and Fedora is not occupying the moral high ground at all. It looks like corporate bickering to me. Anyway, beware the FUD.

Re:Slow?

[BusterB]

I agree with you; I have the same slow resizing, scrolling, text rendering, etc. with a Radeon 9250. It's amazing that the eye-canding is so smooth and fast yet the actual apps are many times slower. All I can fathom is that since every window now has a backing store and gets represented as a texture, this update overhead is to blame, but I really have no idea how it really works.

Re:Why a LiveCD?

[Eil]

Because a flash drive distro, if not engineered properly, can ruin the device. These things have a limited number of write cycles. For example, if some idiot puts /tmp on the drive rather than in memory, the drive will give up the ghost or would be a lot closer to doing so than it was before after only a few boots.

Tantalizing and frustrating

[Nuffsaid]

I just tried the LiveCD on my laptop. It works very smoothly for a random interval, then it totally locks up the machine. The Ati Mobile Radeon x700 works perfectly with the fglrx driver under "proper" Gentoo. I tried passing to the kernel ACPI=OFF NOACPI NODETECT NODHCP, but the result is always a lockup, sometimes even before the GUI startup ends. Maybe the chipset (Ati, again) is at fault, or maybe the specific version of the fglrx driver, or some obscure kernel option. Rather than seeing a brief (usually a minute or two) glimpse of what is possible, I would prefer an early stop with a big red sign "THIS WILL TEACH YOU BUYING ATI CARDS! AHAHAHAH!!!".

Not GPL licenced! BSD / MIT

[Sits]

Xorg isn't licenced under GPL [x.org], it's mostly BSD / MIT (apart from things like fonts). Since Xgl is part of Xorg it too is under an MIT style licence. Being GPL would make things like binary drivers legally very dubious.