The “Break it Down” Blog

For the Linux folks out there that have been wanting to get on the XGL/AIGLX bandwagon with some Vista-like 3D desktop animations you may be farmiliar with the reasons to go with XGL or AIGLX, here’s a little background on them to clarify the situation:

• Demand for 3D effects in a linux desktop started increasing about 2 years ago
• Keith Packard posts his progress with “compositing” and his new X-server on FreeDesktop.org about a year or 2 ago
• Everyone goes nuts
• At the X conference about a year or so ago there was a alot of attention paid to compositing and advanced 3D acceleration of the X-server (XFree86 at that time, now X.org since XFree86 decided to make rediculous demands on licensing and everyone dropped it faster than bad cheese for the X.org branch of it)
• Novell releases this amazing 3D animated X-server and compositing window manager that they have been working on in relative quiet (movie). This implementation requires another X-server and it’s own compositing manager.
• Within a week of Novell’s release, it is announced that another project has been working on getting 3D acceleration working by building ontop of the existing X.org server, it is called AIGLX.

The pro of XGL is that it supported all (nVidia and ATI) of the closed source 3D accelerated drivers for Linux and AIGLX only supported ATI and other open source drivers. So most folks (since most seem to have nVidia cards) were using XGL.

What was just announced recently is that a new project used to bridge the shortcommings of the AIGLX project with code from the XGL project. The project is called Glucose. Glucose is a creation of Zack Rusin over at Trolltech (The QT and some KDE guys). So hopefully the AIGLX project, which a lot of people find technically more appealing than the big bomb Novell approach, will get the love it needs to combine the two projects so we can stop trying to decide between one or another and just integrate all the work together and work on features.