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."

zomg, sweet

[Scott Swezey]

Well the graphics are cool, but does it actually increase how useable my computer is? Not to mention the obivous questions like "will my crappy integrated graphics card even come close to running this?"

Either way, I think I'll give it a try ^^

Some thoughts.

[Anonymous Coward]

First off, I tried it yesterday and it's really really neat.. I mean giggle like a schoolgirl neat when you first move that jiggly window around. I'm so glad someone finally did this cuz I was about to risk my xorg install to see it :)

For some reason I can't get the zoom stuff or anything involving the "Windows" key working though. Also, I wasn't able to get any video going in real time-- obviously I can't watch a DVD with the CD already in the drive... and streaming wasn't working. Also, I have two monitors but they weren't both detected.

But it's so cool. I have no right to complain.

A question-- Is it just me or is there a kind of aliasing that happens when a window stops moving? It's like it goes "soft" antialiasing as it bounces around, but then just before it snaps back into place it seems to get crisper...

All in all, this is a great CD to show around. Now when's the AIGLX demo LiveCD coming out? ;)

Is there a forum for more plugin ideas?

[Anonymous Coward]

I liked how in one of the videos [freedesktop.org] apps that freeze or are unresponsive turn black and white to indicate they're "dead". It seems that with depth of field and lighting you could do quite a bit with the UI to hint at an application or window's state.

For example, as a dialog boxes pops up, at the same time the underlying windows might drop back and fall into a zone that is out of focus, or perhaps individual windows might literally "pop" up (growing larger with larger shadows). The shadows themselves could be "real" I would imagine, and the shadow could be generated via a virtual light source which could be moved manually or automatically throughout the day.

In short, some of the stuff I've seen seems to have been brought over from OS X, but the power of GLX and AIGLX seem seem to open up a whole new world of GUI possibilities. The zoom effect, combined with vector graphics seems to offer quite a bit to those with visual impairments, for example. Is there a place where UI gurus are talking about new effects that may not only provide eye candy, but increase the usability and even suggest new analogies or interactive effects to make computing easier/better?

Why a LiveCD?

[Knetzar]

I've always wondered, with usb many drives having greater capacity then CDs, why not setup LiveCDs to be run easily from a USB drive and also allow for some configuration data to be saved there?

I'd love to be able to test out distros on a thumbdrive...maybe it's just me though.

XGL rocks :-D

[marcushnk]

I've got it installed on all three of my Ubuntu PC's, and I may be throwing it on my Girlfriend this weekend.
I use it at work and LOVE it.
I've also got copies of this live CD to give out to anyone that likes what I can do.

I really expected it to get annoying but it doesn't, I find it kind of refreshing and it helps deal with all those layers of BROWN. :-P

One thing I have found strange is that it seems to work smoother and better on my laptop with a geforce go 5200 than it does on my 6600 FX card?!?!
Weird but cool.

Slow?

[Lussarn]

The effects are cool and all GL stuff flies with speed, but basic xlib stuff in XGL is slow. Very slow. Resizing windows seems like 10 times slower than xorg, for a good test try opening a complex webpage and resize the windows. Is this something being worked on?

Always when I bring this up it gets dismissed as a configuration error. No, I don't think so. It's the same with this LiveCD as my own compiles before. I have tried on 3Ghz+ computers with Nvidia 6600gt and 6800 cards. In all these demo vides we have seen I have never seen a window resize. If it's just my computers than please upload somewhere a video where resize flies and let me see.

Before this is fixed all this is just a showcase toy. I understand it's new and not optimized but can we at least agree on that some REAL optimization is necessary? Because before it is as fast as xorg it's just useless for real work, and I would really like to have this.

Why not a living cd?

[0xABADC0DA]

Can you imagine what this would do for Linux desktop uptake if it were a living cd instead? After booting up, you have an icon on the desktop that says "Install UbuntuGL". It copies the CD image onto the existing filesystem so the next boot from the CD mounts that as / instead of the cramfs file on the cd. Then bootup is maybe 10 seconds slower than a real install.

Maybe have the installer also create another file on the disk for the User's home dir. Have it automatically mount the existing filesystems like knoppix does. It would take some hacking, but have an overlay filesystem so they could install any programs they wanted permanently to their 'installed' os. Then people that know nothing about computers can use linux regularly without any hassle.

Of course not having a working NTFS driver makes this much more difficult technically. But just imagine saying you can replace your crufty Windows interface with Linux's opengl 3d one, for free, and still boot windows just by taking the cd out.