UDS - last day.

Tonight, the Ubuntu Developers Summit in Mountainview, California at the Googleplex will conclude. Some people, such as the Oxygen guys are already flying out in the course of the day, so attendance is thinning out.

Today, I've attended a couple of BoFs on X in general, since that's pretty interesting for the future of Guidance's displayconfig. The good news is that X will be able to do much more runtime configuration, to the point where the developers think that the infamous xorg.conf can be abandoned completely. That'd mean that we're basically doing all kind of displayconfiguration at runtime, no necessity to restart X anymore and less risk of ending up with an X server that's not starting after configuration changes such as switching to dualhead setups. Really nice.

On the driver front, there has been some discussion during the last days. The intention is to enable Composite (bling!) by default in the next Ubuntu release. Unfortunately, that includes shipping and enaling binary drivers by default in some cases.

More good things Keith Packard told about is that there's some light at the end of the tunnel: It seems that ATi is currently trying to find a way to publish specifications for at least some more of their chips (not *if*, but *how*!), that might have been the effect of AMD buying ATi. There's also promising work being done on a new free NVidia driver. Apparently, some time ago there have been patches obfuscating some code, that is being taken as a starting point for reverse engineering the "Nouveau" driver. So at some point in the future, hopefully not too far away, there will be 3d accelerated X for most of the graphics hardware around.
Also coming up in Xorg is a new memory management system, that will make Composite at acceptable framerates possible for most of the free drivers, and thus more free software users happy.

In the "bulletproof X", we discussed to make the odds that X doesn't start as small as possible. That requires some changes in GDM, mostly to check if X started, and to take measures if not. As Kubuntu guy around here, that kind of fixes also needs to be done in KDM, since Kubuntu is not using GDM. Keeping track of this is probably a good idea, although I wonder how much more things like that are being forgotten to also 'port' to Kubuntu.

Yesterday night, we went out in Mountainview again, visited a bookstore where I got a copy of Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture. David Vignoni from the Oxygen team joined us to have a burger (restaurant version, not the fast food thing, I managed to avoid that special experience yet) and a couple of beers. Tonight, we'll conclude this summit going out to have food with most of the people attending it, tomorrow I'll go to San Francisco for four more night, nothing specific planned yet (drop me a note if you're in the Bay area and want to go out for a drink).

The Googleplex is a really nice location, though, and the Googlers are taking care of us Free Software people just excellently. Special thanks to Leslie Hawthorn for being around, answering all our questions and being the nice girl we can approach with whatever we have. Thanks Leslie!

[ Fri, 10 Nov 2006 22:19:59 +0100 ] permanent link

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