RandR 1.2 support in future drivers from NVIDIA

In a recent interview the Director of Unix Software at NVIDIA, Andy Ritger, answered questions about the Linux drivers development at NVIDIA. In this regard he mentioned that there will be RandR 1.2 support in the future NVIDIA drivers.

RandR 1.2 is one of the main improvements of current X.Org devices which is already supported by the Intel driver and will soon be supported by the free ATI cards driver. Support in the free NVIDIA cards driver Nouveau can also be expected once it is more stable.
On the user side there is already work going on to include the new features in the standard GUIs. KDE 4.0 for example will ship with a RandR 1.2 enabled configuration tool and also with a tray applet.

However, the question was always what the proprietary drivers will do. Both drivers already have their own implementations to handle displays – the proprietary ATI drivers ship with a dynamic solution already for over a year, for example. And both NVIDIA and ATI/AMD have problems accepting AIGLX – ATI/AMD didn’t support it at all, and NVIDIA implemented its own version of GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap instead of supporting AIGLX (I wonder why, btw.).

But now Andy Ritger made sure that they will support RandR 1.2:

RandR 1.2 support; this will layer on top of the NVIDIA X driver’s current dynamic display configuration support.

This means that in future Linux versions you can natively configure your entire screen setup and everything else no matter which kind of driver you use for your NVIDIA card. You don’t have to use closed third party tools to manage the configuration, but you can even develop your own if you want.

It would be a huge advantage to see something similar in the ATI/AMD drivers, but there is nothing known about that yet.

Anyway, besides this good news there was one other thing which struck my attention in the interview: the interviewer asked if it might be possible to see a repetition of the forcedeth story in regard to Nouveau. The answer was this:

NVIDIA’s stance is to neither help nor hinder Nouveau. We are committed to supporting Linux through a) an open source 2d “nv” X driver which NVIDIA engineers actively maintain and improve, and b) our fully featured proprietary Linux driver which leverages common code with the other platforms that NVIDIA supports.

That’s interesting, because it is not a clear no. In fact, it is nothing clear at all besides that they don’t care at the moment. I would have expected a more clear no, no matter what they really think. Maybe there is hope in the long distance…

VirtualBox 1.4 released

Innotek released version 1.4 of its famous Open Source virtual machine VirtualBox. Among the new features are 64 bit Linux host support, synchronized clipboards, a user interface for shared folders and native support for VMWare’s disk images. For the first time there are also prepacked versions for Fedora 7, RHEL 5 and Xandros Desktop 4.1 available.

Several of the features added with this release were often asked by the users: while there were previously already the ability to add shared folders it was quite difficult to set up and required long commands in the shell. Now this is no longer necessary due to the new GUI interface. Also, the clipboard synchronization makes it much easier to work with programs on the host and on the vm at the same time.
The native support for VMWare’s virtual disks brings VirtualBox closer to its competitor, making a transition from VMWare to VirtualBox much easier.
On small new feature I personally like is the new notes feature: with this version you can add simple notes to each virtual machine. This helps keeping an overview over the different vms you’re running.

Besides these changes there are many more changelog: serial ports are now supported which might be interesting in case you only have hardware drivers for legacy operating systems. Also, USB ports can now be dynamically added and removed between the virtual machines or given back to the host. Also, the RDP server now supports session shadowing so that the access from more than one client is possible.

For Fedora and RHEL users there are two new features: first of all there are now prepared rpms available for both Fedora 7 and RHEL 5. But for the first time VirtualBox now also works together with an activated SELinux, making it a possible alternative for data centers with higher security standards.

VirtualBox is available in two licences: most of the software is available under the GPLv2. However, the prepacked versions are only available under the VirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL). The basic differences between these two editions are that you need to pay a licence if you want to use the PUEL versions commercially (personal and academic use is for free) and that the PUEL version has some features the free version doesn’t. Among them: the Remote Display Protocol (RDP) Server, USB support, USB over RDP, Shared Folders and iSCSI initiator.

KDE-PIM to be released with KDE 4.0

The KDE-PIM developers decided to release their KDE module together with the main release. That means that KDE 4.0 will ship with a KDE 4 version of the KDE-PIM tools.

All KDE modules had time till June 1st to decide if they would stick to the KDE 4.0 release schedule or would follow their own for this release. In case of KDE-PIM many people believed that it would take its own release schedule due to the fundamental changes like Akonadi.

However, the developers now decided to follow the main release schedule. The application list will slightly change: kandy and kmobile will be dropped from the package while kmobiletools and kabcclient join the module. kpilot was also scheduled to be dropped, however it recently got much attention, therefore it looks like that the last word is not spoken.

For the KDE users this means that they will have a fully functional PIM application suite which also fully integrates with KDE 4. Of course KDE PIM v3 applications could have also been used in KDE 4.0, however they would not have been integrated that much with the environment and would have looked like aliens.

But for now the PIM developers still have quite some things to do: the “Krazy Code Checker” still lists several issues in kdepimlibs and kdepim. But on the other hand KDE 4 is still in Alpha state.