“Ubuntu Xorg maintainer Bryce Harrington recently demonstrated the BulletProof-X feature that is planned for inclusion in Ubuntu 7.10. BulletProof-X provides a failsafe mode which will ensure that users never have to manually configure their graphics hardware settings from the command line.”
Let me be the first to welcome FLOSS to the 20th century!
Seriously, why this wasn’t a part of X from the start is beyond comprehension. Anyway, better late than never.
Sometimes the tech-savvy nature of the community works against us. The priority of this item has not been high enough to warrant attention until now because a broken graphical subsystem, devastating for the users of most OSes, is just a damned nuisance to us.
Then again, our priorities get a bit screwed, and resources get allocated in the wrong places. This fundamental feature won’t ever garner a tenth the attention that the mostly useless Compiz Fusion does.
Some people might *seriously* disagree with you. Take my 1/2 blind father, who didn’t like using computers until he was introduced to the “Enhanced Zoom” compiz-fusion plugin.
Just because that “damned shiny stuff” doesn’t appeal to you doesn’t mean it can’t increase the usability of the desktop overall. My grandmother also got confused once when she minimized a window. She didn’t know where it went. When introduced to compiz, she liked the minimize animation because it made sense where the window went.
Without some of the disgusting bling, a composited desktop can actually increase usability.
“””
Without some of the disgusting bling, a composited desktop can actually increase usability.
“””
Without the hype, the instability, and the usability regressions, the additional capabilities that compositing affords could indeed improve the desktop. Especially in really unsexy areas, like helping 1/2 blind people.
One fundamental feature of Compiz/Fusion, is that sleeping applications get dark, instead of repeating everything over it. Without Compiz/Fusion, applications seem to mess up graphically, not responding, so that other applications gets repainted onto the canvas of the sleeping application. Making it darker, as in Compiz/Fusion, is much much more intuitive for the average user.
“One fundamental feature of Compiz/Fusion, is that sleeping applications get dark, instead of repeating everything over it.”
This feature of compiz annoys me quite a bit, mainly because it occurs seemingly at random (i know it isnt, but it looks like it is). Sometimes windows with no activity gets dark then they illuminate again even though nothing visual has actually happened.
“Without Compiz/Fusion, applications seem to mess up graphically”
With Compiz/Fusion OpenGL apps mess up graphically, at least in my experience on Fedora 7.
This was supposed to be in Feisty, if I remember correctly. This is the type of technology that will attract Linux users to Ubuntu and Windows users to Linux.
I’m pretty sure you meant 21st century…
This is an awesome development. However, they should plug it in with the restricted driver manager, so you can set up your accelerated X right away.
No, he meant 20th Century…
Considering that the phrase “welcome to the 20th century” is synonymous with “welcome to the year 1901” (because that’s when the 20th century began), then I’m pretty sure he meant “21st century” – because otherwise that would be a rather stupid comment. There were *no* computers in 1901. Saying that would be as irrelevant as saying “welcome to the 19th century”.
“Welcome to the 21st century” on the other hand, is quite appropriate if you want to signify that something is catching up on a technological level.
“Considering that the phrase “welcome to the 20th century” is synonymous with “welcome to the year 1901″”
This depends on what region you are in. In many countries the “the 20th century” is now and the 21st will be after 2099.
And those countries would be?
I’ve never heard that before. What countries are you talking about?
“What countries are you talking about?”
Sweden, for one. I presume it’s the same for the other scandinavian countries.
o <– joke
O
+ <– you
^
You’re late.
this is not part of X because of what X actually is. It was up to the developers working on the specific desktop environment to implement the gui for setting up the configurations. All X does is provide the framework. So don’t blame the X developers.
Also just because ubuntu is years behind the likes of novell and red hat doesn’t mean that linux has all of a sudden gotten a usability boost. But it’s nice to see ubuntu finally getting a step closer to fulfilling the promise of a user-friendly fool-proofed linux distribution. Keep it up and in 5 years you might actually get to the level of windows xp. Me … i’m going os x …
How so?
I haven’t seen a fool-proofed anything since I started using the first generation of Macs and PCs. Consistency and simplicity are realistic goals.
The OS with the most complicated and inconsistent networking paradigms is your baseline for usability.
this has got to be one of the top 5 features that has needed to be in linux since its graphical inception! thank you!
Linux has had it! See Mandrake/SUSE
You do know that Fedora has had exactly this feature for some time now? Just because Ubuntu announcs this with so much horn-tooting doesnt mean that it is the first distro to implement this.
Now I don’t get to feel leet because I actually do know how to configure it (correctly) from a tty. This makes me sad.
you don’t get to be leet coz it is l33t, not leet, amateur :p
You don’t get a cookie either, it is newb not amateur :p
51f j00 4r3 1337 … 1 r t3h 1337 !!!11oneone
Don’t worry. Enough monitors lie about their frequency ranges that your skills will still have plenty of value.
Vendors don’t seem to care if the EDIDs are right. They just put a windows “driver” CD in the box.
Ubuntu users feel leet now? lol.
No, I’m actually lying. Every single one of us feel like noobs.
What was that point of that comment anyway, random discrimination against Ubuntu users? Like it’s not just Debian with some user-friendliness enhancements and a newer version of glibc.
I didn’t know ubuntu users hated tettys so much
well, it is surprising that people didnt do this before, although i must say its not really anything impressive, its certainly something ALOT of people could have quite easily constructed themselves should they have wanted, i personally made a much simpler version which just graphically allowed one to correct the xorg.conf, for a livecd..
oh well, i suppose this is good news after all – If this is what the people want, by all means, give it to them
im more excited about Xorg 7.3 (xserver 1.4, xrandr 1.2, etc) this will make all possible in the future to just “start x” even without a xorg.conf file, no need to configure anything, ever.
unless is something really specific like keyboad layout, etc, that being said, i don’t really have any problem to configure xorg.conf or any other configuration files, im a system administrator, but this will be good for X in general.
Edited 2007-08-29 23:40
i personally hope one will be able to override all in xorg.conf still :>
Shit, that has been possible for a long time. The X-server has had that functionality for many years. Even pre-7.0 versions could do that. Without an xorg.conf X.org will attempt to autodetect your system. This is something I did back in early 2005 with the LinuxFromScratch 6.0 LiveCD. And I’ve done it on my LFS installation and my gentoo installation as well. Of course it isn’t bulletproof but X.org does attempt to autoconfigure itself.
Yes, but Daniel Stone’s work on the x.org 7.3 (xserver 1.4) output hotplugging was not there. In the newer x.org it is, and this is what seperates the two.
Not only will it autodetect your monitor, but it won’t be 1024×768 on your 1600×1050 flat panel. Very nice indeed.
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/Releases/7.3
If this is true, I will dance a jig. Finally reliable TV-Out for my Intel 852GM card with the crippled VBIOS? Not holding my breath though, too many failures already
“Shit, that has been possible for a long time.”
yes and no. The X.Org autoconf has worked pretty well for a long time but some things didnt work, like autodetecting and configuring 3button/wheel mice (at least I always had to specify it manually).
One thing i would really like to see is the possibility of just having a partial config file. It would be really nice if you could just manually configure your, say, mouse without having to bother with serverlayout and screens and such.
Well you can always run /usr/bin/xorgconfig. It has a “nice” butt ugly menubased interface which reminds me of 1987
It’s actually nice to use, despite being user-unfriendly and scary for non-geeks. Lucky me that I know the vertical and horizontal refresh frequencies for my monitor, and know my graphics card intimately (Note to my self: Why in the name of $deity do I know that!?) and so on.
This way you can set up your config file in details without having to edit it manually (manually as in editing the file in vim/emacs ($deity forbid that!)/nano/whatever).
“Well you can always run /usr/bin/xorgconfig.”
Yes but it would still be nice if you could just manually configure one thing and leave everything else to be auto-detected.
“Lucky me that I know the vertical and horizontal refresh frequencies for my monitor, and know my graphics card intimately”
This reminds me of one other thing that didnt work (but hopefully does now); the auto-detection of my laptop LCD. For some reason X.org think its dimensions are 2096×1548 (or some such oddball values), fail to use it and falls back on VGA. Maybe it’s the LCD but it does work in Windows (without any special drivers). I always end up specifying the refresh rates manually.
12 years ago, like Windows 95.
At least Linux is slowely getting there…. slowely.
Try 22 years ago, in AmigaOS…
Shouldn’t have been too difficult; have a daemon running in the background to monitor the X session and when an X session fail, it would be a matter of launching it with the default vesa driver with a low resolution setting.
I hear you. But that solution is so obvious and simple and we can’t have these days
Everything MUST be so overly complex as (im)possible. That’s the hallmark of the 21st century
Of course, a series of XML files or an 80MB binary registry as one example
I tend to be one of those annoying people who end up pointing out really simple solutions when the ‘intellectual giants’ are trying to come up with grandious solutions.
Like I say… why make X more fault tolerant when you can be working on wobbly windows instead?
At any rate, it’s done. And within a 6-12 months, all the distros will have similar functionality, except for maybe Slackware, whose users might consider the lack of functionality a feature.
Mark the year as 2007 for posterity.
Of course – Microsoft does the same stupid thing too; why correct issues and do the unsexy corrections when adding ‘ooh shiny’ can get alot more attention. Which one gets more attention, transactional file system or DirectX based compositing.
As for distributions; I think there are greater issues at play besides wobbly windows and tolerance to X launch failures. Yes, it will reduce the gap between *NIX and the competitors but at the same time it would be ignorant to assume that all the hardware and software issues can be ignored and *NIX take off on the desktop.
“””
but at the same time it would be ignorant to assume that all the hardware and software issues can be ignored and *NIX take off on the desktop.
“””
Indeed. And that is where a true believer, willing to work hard to fit a round peg, that he believes in, into a somewhat out-of-round hole, can make all the difference.
It’s hard on the hair. Fortunately, we Bergmans are resistant to hair loss. And there’s always Mennen for the gray.
But I truly believe that I have made Linux desktops work better, over all, for my clients than Windows would have.
Lot’s of hurdles left. And the devs of the various projects are critical to our clearing those.
But this foot-soldier, for one, has a good feeling about what has been accomplished so far.
True – for me, I’m patient. I’ve been using computers for 20 years. I see alot of youngsters here get all tense and angry when things done move fast enough. For me, change occurs, but occurs gradually. Microsoft got to its position over a space of 15 years. Same will occur for any replacement for the current monopoly/dominant player.
For enterprise customers, Linux along with OpenSolaris and *BSD are more than ready for the desktop. They’re fixed hardware support, 30000 desktops all of the same make and model.
The problems start to occur on the end users desktop; when they have lots of different devices; minidisc players, codecs, video cameras, webcams etc. etc. the complexity takes on a whole new level.
True, but with that being said, alot of the future success or failure for large mainstream adoption is whether vendors are willing to provide specifications and provide drivers for their hardware. Third party software vendors willing to accept that there is an alternative to Windows, and that to ignore it will be the beginning of their own demise.
Care to elaborate? I’d like to know that secret
Reminds me… I’ve got to try that one day (shuffles around looking for where I put my oldkernel.config – I hate to configure the kernel from scratch – can never remember half of it).
What’s the use of wobbly windows?
“What’s the use of wobbly windows?
”
None whatsoever. It’s cute for a little while then it becomes annoying and counterproductive. Just like the “Workspaces on a cube” thing. Cute but rather pointless.
Don’t even get me started on excessive transparency.
Even better, have the x server send out a dbus signal when it dies. The bus will start a daemon that restarts x and exits when not being used. Event based daemons that don’t run all of the time are the latest in tech schmexiness.
Hey, good idea.
Interesting, how come (I’m assuming) two non-programmers came up with a solution that doesn’t require extended intellectual masturbation. Doesn’t that speak volumes to the lack of ‘practical thinking’ there is in the IT world?
A developer I am not, but you could call me a programmer. http://www.digitalprognosis.com/opensource/scripts/ossec-batch-mana…
Overall, you are right though and I’m stealing your “intellectual masturbation” phrase. You kiwis are brilliant sometimes. Must be something in the water.
Ok, now how do you go about implementing that? Yeah, that’s why.
It’s easy to spout off “easy” solutions. It’s a damn sight harder to actually do something with them.
How to implement it was mentioned right in the post. Again, it would require major system tweaking, it would be using existing infrastructure in a way which addresses the issue. No need to have special code.
Look around the myrid of complex ‘solutions’ out there – two prime examples are SOAP and CORBA; neither of them end up addressing what they set out to do. SOAP is overly bloated and scales poorly in a large environemnt. CORBA is fundamentally overly complex for what needs to be accomplished.
Sometimes you’re better off going back to the old UNIX ethos of using a number of small components to get a bigger task done rathe than trying to accomplish everyone by one monolithic programme.
I like the idea too. Sounds like what I thought the new solution would be. But apparently it’s not. Oh well…
I’d settle for a reliable way of actually killing it dead, instead of letting it lock-up the whole machine, when it pukes.
Look up “magic SysRq key” for getting out of X locking up. Not all distros enable it by default (it’s a kernel setting), but Ubuntu does.
Yeah, enabled this some months back (I’m on Gentoo) but it does not seem to help no matter what combinations I try. If you have any good info-links that go beyond the kernel documentation, I’m listening
Ctrl+alt+backslash* ought to kill X.org. Of course it doesn’t work if you start xdm/gdm/kdm on boot
– that’ll just make X.org restart perpetually *that’s why I don’t have xdm in my runlevels 
)
*BACKSLASH! Remember that. Not delete. B A C K S L A S H
You can use the following mnemonic for a safe shutdown: “Raising Skinny Elephants Is Utterly Boring” (i.e. Alt+SysRq+R, Alt+SysRq+S, Alt+SysRq+E, etc.)
The “live” version of Ubuntu falls back to a lower resolution if it cannot identify the monitor frequencies. This leads to windows that are too big for the screen so you cannot reach the OK or CANCEL buttons to actually install Ubuntu… so I had to edit xorg.conf and restart the X server just to install the damn thing.
Falling back to lower resolutions isn’t a good solution. Using the .ini file for the windows “driver” is quite a good idea. Another one would be to just output certain frequencies experimentally and have the user confirm whether he/she sees a stable picture. It’s not as if screens still break if they receive wrong signals.
All this, of course, under the assumption that it isn’t 2007 yet and we are still unable to build systems that “just work”.
Fortunately, there is a cool new feature – Add Model which allows users to add a new monitor by using the Windows driver CD that comes with their monitor. This uses a script to parse the Windows *.inf file to get the hsync, vsync, edid, dpms, and other info to update the database locally.
Now THIS is cool. If it works properly they could start thinking about using this method to automate the installation of other devices. Stuff like USB Wireless Adapters, USB Webcams…
Nice thought.
It would be even better to give this tool to the manufacturers so that they could give better Linux support with minimum effort.
This is a nice development, but seriously, X can’t be considered bulletproof until it ceases to lock up on errors half of the time.
(And someone should tell the devs that they have to update a driver when a critical bug in it is fixed, instead of leaving the changes in CVS and letting the driver stay broken for thousands of users.)
It doesn’t.
I mostly deliberately entered nvirdia to be sure it didn’t enter graphical mode. So i could install a custom nvidia driver.
This bulletproof X feature will probably save the day for a lot of users and that is far more important imho.
And it still wins over windows because they aren’t going to remove the ability to manually configure things from a text mode console.
Once upon a time it was “You are supposed to have a valid config file”.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/50718 – Shameless plug, I know, but still.
I can’t believe the lack of history culture of those so-called writer
here comes a quick list of distros which have this features for years
corel os -> xandros
linuxppc2k
mandriva since mandrake 8.0 (drakx11 anyone ?)
and I’m pretty sure linspire has it as well…
come on, stop PRing ubuntu so bad
Why is it that Knoppix (based on Debian, if I’m correct) always got my video settings 100%? And then there’s Debian, who basically forced you into command-line hell editing this and conf’ing that. Ubuntu was/is a nice mediator, as long as you kept with the default video driver. Of course, trying to force Fiesty to accept the fact that my video card is a GeForce 7950 was an excercise in futility and reinstallation.
I couldn’t tell if this was a (propietary) driver problem, or something f’ed with Xorg/free-86 from the get-go. I hope this makes X a lot better and easier to administer.
In Fedora there is system-config-display including monitor detection and default vesa mode detection if recognizing the graphics adapter’s native modes fails. Easy and comfortable to use for a long time already.