This thing has an 800Mhz Intel x86, Intel 910 graphics, and a 5.6 inch screen. I got to play with one yesterday and I just had to see how well Compiz ran on it. It was surprisingly nice, no stuttering or anything, unlike the Classmate. Probably not very practical though, except for cool open and close animations. You don’t really need wobbly, if you’re not using every app fullscreen or maximized on here you’re crazy.
Whee, haven’t done this in quite some time.
Let’s see, what has been going on since last time I blogged.
First off, unfortunately it looks like the X3000/X3100 (also known as 965) intel chip will still be blacklisted in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (hardy). We tried switching to EXA so we could get Xvideo and Composite at the same time but in order for EXA performance to match XAA performance we have to use the ttm version of the driver. The work on this is not yet complete and is not believed to be ready for use, especially in an LTS release. Unless things change in the next month or so this is probably the final word on the subject and these unforunate Intel users will have to wait for Ubuntu 8.10 to use Compiz.
On a more positive note, we think we might have a partial solution for the problems with OpenGL when using the intel and ati drivers with Compiz. Here is the most obvious demonstration of the problem I’m talking about:
The true fix for this is called redirected direct rendering and would be great to have however it too is not yet realistic for inclusion in Ubuntu. Instead we have a way to at least make sure OpenGL apps behave when you put them under another window (and when you rotate the cube too but not the way you want). This is all very preliminary and we don’t even have the code for it yet but we’ve proven the concept. I’ll write a new post explaining what we’re going to do when we have something to show.
When you combine this with the various window management fixes happening upstream and increased integration with the rest of the system Compiz in hardy should be very nice. We’ve also cleared out the blacklist to see if cards that had problems in gutsy are working better in hardy. We’ll probably end up adding back some of these (like the 965) but hopefully we can have a smaller list this time. We also added the fglrx driver to the whitelist but due to a bug the GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap extension is not being offered correctly so Compiz will not work with this driver in Ubuntu yet.
On an unrelated note, I’ve added a reCaptcha to this blog to cut down on spam. None of the spam was getting through to the site but it also wasn’t being caught by akismet so I had to go through all posts in moderation and filter out the spam manually. This is why no comments posted to this blog since late November had been accepted, it was too much of a hassle. I’m leaving the comment moderation on for now until I see how things go so if you haven’t commented on this blog before you’ll have to wait for me to approve your comment.
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