Today Novell announced the release of Xgl and Compiz, the new window manager/composition manager to go with it. Novell has the release details here.

Videos of Xgl in action:

1. True transparency .mpg (12MB)| .ogg (3.7MB) | streaming flash
2. Zoom .mpg (8.5MB) | streaming flash
3. Desktop Organization .mpg (16MB) | .ogg (5.7MB) | streaming flash
4. Spinning Cube .mpg (16MB) | .ogg (7.1MB) | streaming flash

Stephen at CNet puts it in context in his Novell seeks to boost Linux graphics article.

Compiz is a new joint window manager and composition manager. David Reveman had to merge these into a single process to provide the kind of functionality that we wanted on the desktop.

Compiz has a plugin framework, many of the visual effects are implemented by independent plugins. We hope to see numerous plugins for new effects that plug into the existing window manager.

Now, the actual decoration rendering was split out into a separate process. Today Compiz has its own internal rendering of the window decorations which uses Cairo and an alpha channel to render its decorations.

But someone could write a Gnome/Metacity decoration renderer or a KDE decoration rendered. Both would allow existing window manager themes to integrate with Compiz.

Xgl has already been checked into the public repositories, Compiz will be checked in after David Reveman's presentation at the X conference.

Check the Novell page for details on downloading the software.

Hari, which is in charge of Mono's C# compiler, will be representing Mono at LinuxAsia 2006 in New Delhi. He will do a few talks and will also be at the Novell booth.

The company where my friend Juantom�s works just got funded by Skype and Google (18 million Euros).

They are pitching an interesting way of providing WiFi access everywhere by having people donate their bandwidth. See what they are doing.

Atsushi has posted the result from his optimization week running the XMLmark benchmark. Very good results for a week of work, the graphs show transactions per second and the Mono revision number:

See his post for all the details on this work.

Windows.Forms updates

Peter has posted an update to the Mono Windows Forms blog on their current work here.

Sebastien posted some nice screenshots of the new region code in libgdiplus:

See his blog for further discussion.

Mono on MacOSX/Intel

Geoff has been working on porting Mono to OSX/Intel, his progres report as well as the testing DMG are here.

Packaging

For the upcoming versions of Mono, we will be splitting the gtk-sharp packages to reduce the dependencies that a given application needs.

So if you just use Gtk+ your application will not pull all the Gnome stack to run.

From #mono-winforms IRC channel today:

<jackson> man at what point in your life do you start bootlegging OS videos.

Erik just announced that he is the series editor for a number of books on Mono for Addison Wesley.

Nat is in Paris demoing the upcoming Novell Linux Desktop, PC world has a description of his talk.

Peter Sestoft released version 1.0 of his C5 generics library for C#, it is available here:

C5 provides functionality and data structures not provided by the standard .Net System.Collections.Generic namespace, such as tree data structures, heap based priority queues and hash indexed array lists and linked lists, making it more comprehensive than collection class libraries on similar platforms, such as Java. Unlike many other collection class libraries, C5 is designed with a strict policy of supporting "code to interface not implementation".

C5 is documented on his technical report and he also has the docs online.

Mono bundles his old 0.5 library, we will be upgrading the library soon.

When am browsing documentation for an API on the .NET Framework in the Microsoft Documentation Browser I get the signature for the method in a bunch of languages.

I typically only care about the C# signature, I really do not care about the other five languages. Now, when I turn them off with the "Language Filter: " to only show C# that works fine as long as I do not try to read another page. As soon as I switch to a different API the filter is reset and shows "All" again.

I tried Googling for an answer. I even tried search-dot-msn-dot-com-ing it, but I could not find any way of forcing the doc browser to keep it funky.

As the subject says, Mono, Beagle and F-Spot are now included in the second beta of Nexenta.

Nexenta is an operating system built on top of the OpenSolaris core and the Debian userland.

Beagle is the Mono-based desktop search that we implemented at Novell (similar in spirit to Google Desktop search or Apple's spotlight).

F-Spot is our personal photo management software.

This is great, and we look forward to help the Nexenta developers with any issues they might have with Mono on OpenSolaris.

Although to reach magnificent-hack status we still need Sun and Apple to ship Mono.

Video

Oh, and if you have not seen the video from the previous blog entry, you should.