OT: Linux 3D-Desktop XGL

It is. I've been running Linux exclusively at home for about 4 years. Having multiple desktops is something you don't realize is useful until you have it and then use a system that doesn't have it.

The latest release of Mandriva, my Linux of choice, includes XGL. I played with it after installing and it worked quite well, even on my crusty 1.7 GHz machine with a 128Mb nVidia card.

If you drag a window to the edge of the current desktop, the desktop 'cube' rotates and allows you to drop the window on another desktop.

Sadly, there is an incompatibility between XGL and Java which causes any Java application window to appear as an empty gray square. Since I use quite a few Java apps, I had to shelve XGL until the problem is fixed.

Jim S.

I don't remember seeing the rotating cube containing desktops in the Vista demo. The ability to have multiple independent desktops has been in X for ages, but this is a very logical extension of it. The next logical extension would be to be able to zoom out and see stacks of cubes from which the user could select one to use. And in a network environment this could be extended to seeing other cubes running on other machines. *nix can already share 2D X screens without any extra software.

Of course if you really wanted to get fancy you could use an interface like Google Earth where objects would be apparently flat when viewed up close but would be wrapped onto planets (spheres) and then navigated like GE. Perhaps the whole thing could then be setup like Sim City where the surface of the planet would become slowly covered with "civilization" some of which ran itself based on goals the user setup.

At any rate this reminds me of my old Amiga days when the PC crowd would tell me multi-tasking, high color windowing ability was useless and then say that it was the greatest thing since sliced bread when Windows 3.1 came out.

Thanks for the links.

Has anyone tried SWX under CrossOver or Parallels in that environment? And if so what is the OpenGL performance like?

What I've been using lately is PCLinuxOS,..

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