Re: [Fresco-devel] Some questions

On Sat, Apr 12, 2003 at 07:12:07PM -0400, Nick Lewycky wrote:
> If you hadn't told us you were new to Linux, I wouldn't have guessed. 
> Your question boils down to, "what is the state of X on Linux today, and 
> what is the future and how is Fresco involved?" so I'll organize my 
> answer that way.
> 
> X11 is responsible for handing the back end, drivers, mouse cursor, that 
> sort of thing. A window manager is an X client that is responsible for 

Not exactly. To detail a bit Nick's statement, X protocol management may
be separated from HW drivers. like window managers are separated from
drawing routines. X11 is one X protocol. XFree is one of X11 implementations
and finally, not the least, XFree86 adds to XFree the driver infrastructure
for HW control, originaly for i386 machines but now for other I guess.

[...]
> In Fresco, a client requests the window not directly from the display 
> server, but from the DesktopKit, which is the Fresco incarnation of X11 
> window managers. Similarly for standard UI elements, the clients are 
> expected to ask the WidgetKit to provide them, instead of a client-side 
> library. This means that clients have no idea what "desktop environment" 
> they belong to, since they are decoupled form the implementation of the 
> Kits.
> 
> 3D acceleration is a touchy issue. At the moment, there is no 3D 
> acceleration in Linux without X11, except for a gross hack called fbdri. 
> That said, if you run Fresco on top of X, you can use 3D acceleration today.

If Fresco performs 3D oriented calls, otherwise, how can you use X11 3D?

[...]
> You mention drop shadows, which are nice eye candy and fit rather nicely 
> in Fresco, even though we can't actually draw them yet. A drop shadow is 

But such drawing effects are pixel oriented and not vectors. Isn't that in
contradiction with Fresco capacities?

> a gradient from black to transparent, but we don't support gradients. In 
> theory, though, it would be simple for the DesktopKit to put the 
> appropriate decorations on the window when creating it. Fresco does 
> support alpha channel transparency quite well, so there's no 
> architectural issue in implementing it.
> 
> One of the goals of the Fresco project is to provide a framework for 
> user interface experimentation. This means at least two things, one good 

experimentations... which kind? Programming or using of computer resources?

> one bad. The bad news is that most of the tools and know-how for working 
> in a Fresco-like system don't exist yet. You can't make a "theme" for 
> Fresco with The GIMP, since we are a vector graphics system and 
> bitmapped themes are useless to us. The good news is that while it may 

If I understand correctly, Fresco can take advantage of 2D acceleration a
lot more than XFree and even in network remote environments?

-- 
Nicholas Souchu - [email protected] - [email protected]