alanc @ sun.com

Alan Coopersmith’s blog

Random thoughts of a disorganized mind...
(and though it should be obvious, while Sun pays me to think about things, they disclaim any responsibility for these thoughts, nor do I claim what I say matches in any way what Sun thinks)

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http://blogs.sun.com/alanc/date/20050317 Thursday March 17, 2005

Responding to another Alan's blog comments

Just noticed the discussion and questions in the comments Alan Hargreave's blog about Solaris Express 2/05 - I started typing this in as a response there, but it got so long, I figured I'd just put it here and leave a trackback link there.

Does the SPARC version of Solaris 10 get X.Org or does it still use XSun?
Yes, SPARC is still on Xsun, since Xorg includes no driver modules for SPARC graphics cards. We're looking into various ways to solve this, but it will take some time.

Sun is lagging behind several X.org releases...
Our Xorg server is completely up to date with the latest Xorg release (well, this Solaris Express is X11R6.8.2 Release Candidate 2 - the final release of X11R6.8.2 is out now, and has been integrated to a later build of Solaris so it should be in future Solaris Express releases). The rest of the X Window System in Solaris is mostly from X11R6.6 and we're working over time to bring it up to newer versions, but for most of it outside the X server, there's little user noticable changes.

again no Xprint server with OpenGL capabilities in Solaris Express
No, we don't have OpenGL support in Xprint, because as far as I can tell, not one single customer has ever suggested it's something they'd even be remotely interested in us supporting, and it's not something we've thought is likely to be useful to many people. Your posts on this is the first I knew anyone had any use for it.

Eventually we'll move to Xprint based from the latest Xorg tree, and perhaps we'll get it then - if you need it earlier, get your sales rep, tech support contact, ISV relations contact, etc. to submit an RFE or just explain to me why this is so useful to enough customers that we should prioritize it over all the other things we need to work on in the X Window System on Solaris. Like most people, there's a lot more things we could do than the number of hours in the day allow us to do, and we're still working through the ones that will be useful to thousands more people than OpenGL in Xprint - like OpenGL in Xorg itself and better Xorg configuration tools. This is what OpenSolaris should help with in the future, as users with special needs will be able to make the changes they want and work with Sun to get them into future Solaris releases.

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Comments:

I doubt there is anyone interested in Xprint. Even Linux distributions (Slackware, to be precise) don't ship Xprint.

Posted by Tomasz on March 18, 2005 at 02:59 AM PST #

XPrint with OpenGL? What, are you going to print your flying toasters?....

Posted by Dan Mick on March 18, 2005 at 03:40 AM PST #

Whats the chances that in the future Xorg on Solaris will ship with xcompmgr and transset, I wonder?

Posted by benr on March 29, 2005 at 03:20 PM PST #

xcompmgr and transset? I'd say pretty good once they settle down, but for now, they're mostly experimental applications, so we're leaving them out so people who want to experiment can grab the latest versions, but we don't commit to supporting them.

Sun is very interested in the Composite extension that they use (and it's in Xorg in Solaris 10, but off by default, just as it is in the Xorg 6.8.x open source releases). We'll likely be using it in the future for things such as Project Looking Glass and the Gnopernicus GNOME screen magnifier.

Posted by Alan Coopersmith on March 31, 2005 at 08:28 AM PST #

>Even Linux distributions (Slackware, to be precise) >don't ship Xprint. Suse, Gentoo and Debian are shipping Xprint packages. And AFAIK Slackware does it, too.

Posted by Felix Schulte on July 03, 2005 at 10:34 AM PDT #

>XPrint with OpenGL? What, are you going to print >your flying toasters?.... Do you wish to program all your 3D stuff in Postscript for print output? Screen dumps are quite useless when you need quality - if you are not a Postscript guru with lots of free time then there is only one option left for printing 3D content: Xprint (or Win32 GDI+)

Posted by Felix Schulte on July 03, 2005 at 10:39 AM PDT #

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