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[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]Re: [tlug] Printers for linux, was: refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux
- Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2013 10:35:11 +0900
- From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>
- Subject: Re: [tlug] Printers for linux, was: refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux
- References: <CAKXLc7foZEjqJ4O4Ysq=UDNwoV-u30tYXMCDTeEyMO5JGiezqw@mail.gmail.com> <871u12okky.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <CAL-VO6LkDcR70e6ZUuObBkhJqi8Y1=BUVrX_11LuSsGWKu_zkg@mail.gmail.com> <87fvphmw6w.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <CAL-VO6KjbcjCB6ds3SY5QLydR5Wg=3_yXpqRtWdqu1R8zSM_VA@mail.gmail.com> <877gasmdhm.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <CAL-VO6Kj0Maz=W1eRAV_oLpODNxVXBBZOPWdntZsxa79vngGFA@mail.gmail.com> <87vby9lgca.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <CAL-VO6JGjsCFF8fSmavobogkg7yZ1iGENZTwjTfH-BuVHxO5yg@mail.gmail.com> <87r48xkx4l.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <CAL-VO6+0s=hyqTJX+gPM5EcHpmKCJD-C1zA=BdTkeSxTPpkXdw@mail.gmail.com> <87ob41koe6.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <CAL-VO6Jugs5=EXV+KQYm5ca0kbQeS-yKxjyxr2Yy1W8_y+F6NQ@mail.gmail.com> <87lhz4lcqs.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <CAL-VO6JyhvG25TLxFDg8w+G55wCGt1=dZxGPSY1W3LA7aERDKg@mail.gmail.com> <877gankwzw.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <CAL-VO6+J8PZw4G43EBrWWOBC4aSbVMa5zkf3rPWeiYc6zs3yzw@mail.gmail.com>
Benjamin Tayehanpour writes: > Do you have any tips on recommended reading if I want to know more > about why X is the way it is? Heh. As old as I am, that's still before my time. The X protocol itself took more or less its current form by late 1987 with the release of X11R2 (there was no public X11R1 release). X11R4 (the first version I came into contact with) was out at the end of 1989. X11R5 was late 1991, at which point Xlib was fully internationalized. I don't know where you'd find the politics (it was a huge academic/ industrial consortium, after all), but O'Reilly's The X Window System does provide a lot of the rationale. I guess on the Web I'd start with Wikipedia's "X Window System" page, and then from there the chapter on "X-Windows" from The Unix-Haters Handbook. http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf Also, a lot of things that today would "obviously" be primitives (specifically, Porter/Duff compositing[1] technology) in 1985 were closely held secrets of folks like Tom Duff at LucasFilm. (Note that Wayland describes itself as a protocol for communicating with a compositor, not as a protocol for driving a console.) > Wayland seems to be the only "X-killer" project which is actually > going places. At least as far as I know. First off, the alternatives > are few to begin with; Note that actually none of these are really "X killers", in the sense that none of them define a rendering wire protocol AIUI -- I haven't looked very closely though. So for the foreseeable future, at least for the projects I've looked at, X is going to be the portable rendering protocol for clients that don't need super-high-performance graphics. So, for example, Wayland basically seems to be a way to give the window manager (Wayland compositor) finer control over what goes on the screen (including grabbing the root window and turning it into a surface composited into the actual display!), while getting the window manager/compositor out of the data path when direct rendering is possible. How that is going to be done when using transparent or translucent windows is beyond me. There's a comment on the Wayland site to the effect that when using a rotating cube effect while changing users -- and therefore for security reasons, X servers -- the X screen is copied to a buffer in Wayland and transformed appropriately. I would assume that translucent windows would have to be handled the same way. So I kinda suspect that Wayland displays will end up being either flat or slow -- just like X. :-) What all of these projects seem to be aiming at is giving games and eye candy a standard way to access direct rendering functionality. In theory, there could be a standard rendering protocol (eg, cairo[2]) without going through the X server. Wayland doesn't give you that, instead you have to go relatively low-level with *GL -- or stay portable but relatively low-level with X. I'm not sure what Mir does, but I think it opens the door to low-level rendering protocols. So as I said to Edward, I see fragmentation happening here. Maybe that's a good thing, if it means development can move forward fast enough for Ubuntu to muscle up to the handheld trough, and compete with Microsoft, Apple, and Google. > > [I] just want to type \nopagebreak and get on with [my] life! > > You're preaching to the choir. :-) Yeah, I know. But there is a big constituency for "if we could just make Linux more popular...". People seem to think that means copying Microsoft's successes (as horrible as I think Word is, in the market it's a success). As a response to that, "you're looking in the wrong place" (ie, everywhere but on smartphones) was dead on, but to the extent that we're free software advocates[3], that kind of success isn't good enough. IMHO YMMV TINLA YHBT HAND (or something like that :-). > I just wish I could *get* TeX. Ah, well, TeX is hard. I'm really interested to see what Simon has to say about this, but since I'm not going to have time to be in "TeX- killer" space for a while, I'll just wing it here. You need to remember that TeX was written by a single brilliant mind in the early 1980s, and like Emacs and Ghostscript, it bears the stamp of its author's personality. Like Emacs and Ghostscript, it bears the burden of an idiosyncratic language. At least Emacs Lisp really is a Lisp, even if it's one of the suckiest surviving members of the family, and even if Postscript is Forth basically, by the same token it's pretty easy to generate it algorithmically. Like Ghostscript, but unlike Emacs, TeX's language is sufficiently arcane that "ordinary users" find it difficult to contribute to it. (Paradoxically -- or maybe not :-) -- that's why TeX and Ghostscript were historically in universal use in free software distributions, and Emacs isn't.) But TeX is a macro language, and one that is very much exposed to users. Like most macro languages, it is asyntactic -- one of the important contributions of LaTeX was the introduction of the concept of "environment" with properly nested \begin and \end, and of "elements" (to borrow the SGML term) like \emph{}. Yet the underlying TeX macros remain exposed, and they make the language very stateful. Worse, state often changes implicitly (at paragraph or page boundaries, for example). Syntax of control structures is horrible, and almost never used by ordinary users, except in the very watered- down form of LaTeX environments (which are actually quite nice). TeX is also unable to take advantage of improvements around it, most importantly Unicode, but also font technology. The font specification model is deeply embedded in TeX, and while it is possible to shim in a different technology (as in the case of XeTeX), until quite recently there wasn't really an industry standard either for selection of fonts or for querying characteristics. So you choose one such technology, but that often ties you to a particular platform (as XeTeX was tied to the Mac for quite a long time). But the basic complexity of quite detailed knowledge about fonts remains in TeX, and it often shows through even at the user level, and definitely for style writers. > hitherto most tutorials (and even some documentation) too often > state "we'll ignore what this actually means and move on for > now". Unfortunately, that's sort of inevitable given the architecture of TeX. All too often "what this actually means" is a change in global state that more or less subtly changes the meaning of hundreds of TeX macros. Luke: But Master, what does this actually mean? Yoda: Far far away galaxy there was, and long ago time is. Named parameter changes were there, widely galactic, and ... oh, let's ignore what this actually means and move on for now, OK? Darth Vader for you waiting is! But parametric galaxies forget thee not, for in the Force change subtle yet today there is. Yes, this is horrible, but I think Don Knuth of all people would be aware of the dangers of premature optimization, so I conclude that the optimization (globals everywhere) must have been necessary at the time. Footnotes: [1] Here compositing refers to pixel blending, whereas in Wayland AFAICT it refers to window management (windows as "big pixels"?) [2] I wonder if it would be possible to create an RPC protocol bound to Cairo, and if that would beat X? [3] Versus "hacker privilege" advocates. "All software yours now ours is", anybody? ;-)
- References:
- [tlug] Printers for linux, was: refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux
- From: Kalin KOZHUHAROV
- [tlug] Printers for linux, was: refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux
- From: Stephen J. Turnbull
- Re: [tlug] Printers for linux, was: refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux
- From: Benjamin Tayehanpour
- Re: [tlug] Printers for linux, was: refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux
- From: Stephen J. Turnbull
- Re: [tlug] Printers for linux, was: refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux
- From: Benjamin Tayehanpour
- Re: [tlug] Printers for linux, was: refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux
- From: Stephen J. Turnbull
- Re: [tlug] Printers for linux, was: refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux
- From: Benjamin Tayehanpour
- Re: [tlug] Printers for linux, was: refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux
- From: Stephen J. Turnbull
- Re: [tlug] Printers for linux, was: refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux
- From: Benjamin Tayehanpour
- Re: [tlug] Printers for linux, was: refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux
- From: Stephen J. Turnbull
- Re: [tlug] Printers for linux, was: refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux
- From: Benjamin Tayehanpour
- Re: [tlug] Printers for linux, was: refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux
- From: Stephen J. Turnbull
- Re: [tlug] Printers for linux, was: refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux
- From: Benjamin Tayehanpour
- Re: [tlug] Printers for linux, was: refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux
- From: Stephen J. Turnbull
- Re: [tlug] Printers for linux, was: refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux
- From: Benjamin Tayehanpour
- Re: [tlug] Printers for linux, was: refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux
- From: Stephen J. Turnbull
- Re: [tlug] Printers for linux, was: refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux
- From: Benjamin Tayehanpour
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