[Fresco-devel] fosdem 2004

hi there,

last weekend was the annual fosdem conference in Brussels
(http://www.fosdem.org), and I was there to present our
project. I just wanted to send a little note to tell you
about my impressions.

The original plan was to meet with Mourad ('mourad'),
Tobias ('hunger'), and Patrick ('oxygene'), but unfortunately
Tobias didn't make it so we were only three.
However, it was great fun to meet and hang out together !

The conferences were of course very interesting, too.
In the 'X and co.' track there were (beside Fresco itself of course)
Keith Packard presenting his latest work on X and Denis Oliver Kropp
presenting DirectFB.
Both talks were very interesting, and they confirmed that there
is still a need to work on Fresco :-)

Denis mostly showed a lot of (very impressive) demos with overlapping
translucent 2D (TV etc.) and 3D (openGL) animations in impressive
frame rates of up to 700 fps. On the technical side the few impressions
I got reminded me strongly of the early berlin days, i.e. low level
assembler & IPC stuff. He went as far as patching the kernel to
add another IPC mechanism, and of course run the main application
as super user. Quite scary...

Keith on the other hand kept pointing out how he added more extensions,
pushing more policy issues into new clients (a composite manager notably,
doing some layout work on offscreen video memory). Quite a hack...

In general I found Tim O'Reilly's talk to be the most thought provoking,
and Jon Hall's the most entertaining.
Richard Stallman sang as usual his Free Hacker's song...

I'm now trying to figure out ways to do some simple prototyping to validate
some of what we have been discussing recently on irc, just to push everybody's
motivation and get the ball rolling again. I feel there's still a lot of
room for improvement in the unix desktop world, things that can not be done
inside the realm of X (or DirectFB for that matter). Let's move on !

Regards,
		Stefan