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The State Of Various Experimental Open-Source Projects

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  • The State Of Various Experimental Open-Source Projects

    Phoronix: The State Of Various Experimental Open-Source Projects

    Quite often on Phoronix we cover various experimental open-source projects that catch our interest as they're interesting from a technical perspective, but often these projects don't end up stabilizing due to limited manpower or prove to be too technically ambitious. Here's a look at some of the less heard of open-source projects that have previously been covered on Phoronix to look at where they are today...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    I like this sort of multiple checkup

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    • #3
      I wanna read more about the klang audio project ( http://klang.eudyptula.org/ ).
      =\

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      • #4
        https://github.com/laanwj/mesa

        Looks like Michael hasn't been looking hard enough .

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        • #5
          Speaking the progress of small experimental open-source Linux projects, I'm currently working on Thred, an embroidery design program. Due to the niche being rather small, pretty much no embroidery software supports Linux, it's all closed-source and DRM'ed (many even using hardware DRM devices), and costs a fortune. Pretty much like it was with 3D modelling programs before Blender.
          Thred was also originally like that (with the exception of hardware DRM and costing a fortune), but the original developers stopped maintaining it and released the code into the public domain. So one person managed to get it to compile under winelib, and I'm expanding on his work. I ported the codebase from C++ to C and made it compile under 64-bit (albeit I also disabled that after some testing, as the code has some hardcoded things that don't work properly on 64-bit yet). Currently I'm in the middle of documenting and cleaning the codebase. Once that's done, it will be much easier to separate the UI from the internal logic, which will in turn cut the winelib dependency from the core. Then it's just a matter of writing a Linux GUI for it (probably GTK3).

          Another small project I was working on was Arcomage Clone. It's a clone of Arcomage, a card game by New World Computing, a companion game in the Might and Magic series. I took over the project from the previous maintainer as well, ended up rewriting much of it to be more modular and modable. Though I haven't worked on it for a while now, as I'm occupied with Thred at the moment. The interesting thing is how there's SDL2 now, and Arcomage Clone UI uses SDL 1.2. At the same time, there's Derelict 3, the D bindings to SDL2 that is also under heavy development at the moment. So I'm pretty sure I'll end up porting the UI to Derelict 3, once it becomes stable enough.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by GreatEmerald View Post
            Speaking the progress of small experimental open-source Linux projects, I'm currently working on Thred, an embroidery design program. Due to the niche being rather small, pretty much no embroidery software supports Linux, it's all closed-source and DRM'ed (many even using hardware DRM devices), and costs a fortune. Pretty much like it was with 3D modelling programs before Blender.
            Thred was also originally like that (with the exception of hardware DRM and costing a fortune), but the original developers stopped maintaining it and released the code into the public domain. So one person managed to get it to compile under winelib, and I'm expanding on his work. I ported the codebase from C++ to C and made it compile under 64-bit (albeit I also disabled that after some testing, as the code has some hardcoded things that don't work properly on 64-bit yet). Currently I'm in the middle of documenting and cleaning the codebase. Once that's done, it will be much easier to separate the UI from the internal logic, which will in turn cut the winelib dependency from the core. Then it's just a matter of writing a Linux GUI for it (probably GTK3).
            GreatEmerald,
            I have a better idea, how about you join the Embroidermodder 2 project ( http://sourceforge.net/p/embroidermodder/code ) You will find that we have already added in the thred format, that way anyone that has used thred in the past isn't left out in the cold. Our format reading library (libembroidery) is written in C, supports reading and writing way more formats, and we already have a working command line format converter. All of the library format code is already separate from the Embroidermodder 2 GUI (written in Qt4/Qt5), and is going to be released under a permissive license rather than the GPL. This is intentional so that other programs, such as Inkscape/Karbon/Krita/Gimp will eventually be able to interface with Embroidermodder 2 easily and effortlessly. libembroidery will eventually become the centralized upstream place for embroidery. Any links to Embroidermodder on the thred gitorious wiki are outdated and do not reflect the current status of the project and we have 2 active developers. Embroidermodder 2 has been built for Linux/Windows/Mac/Raspberry Pi so far. It is nearing an alpha release soon and I'm going to be launching a Kickstarter campaign in the near future so that I may be able to work on it full time.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by cwabbott View Post
              https://github.com/laanwj/mesa

              Looks like Michael hasn't been looking hard enough .
              Etnaviv has advanced hugely since it was covered by Phoronix in January. He's right that it isn't upstreamed, but it does actual GLES2 (GLES1 untested) rendering now. I'm not sure at which phase I should request upstream merging, but now I'm still making large numbers of changes and removing kludges and shunts I created in the beginning, so I don't think it's that time yet.

              My next steps are to find and kill the remaining rendering bugs, to have decent full-screen rendering to be able to run a few games succesfully on the gcwzero/cubox, after that I'll bother with X11.

              Anyway I'm happy to see the project mentioned at all.

              That said, reverse-engineering a GPU and then making a GL driver is a lot of work. It touches a lot of subject areas from compilers, hardware synchronization, to kernel programming. And getting a hang of Mesa's and Gallium inner workings was quite some effort too. And then the Vivante shader ISA is piece of cake compared to some out there, heh cwabott

              If I had some kind of funding and could work on it full time, we'd have had a
              full-fledged driver months ago, but I'm need to dedicate my scarce free time
              to it so have some patience please! Or better, join in and help.

              Comment


              • #8
                Originally posted by cwabbott View Post
                https://github.com/laanwj/mesa

                Looks like Michael hasn't been looking hard enough .
                Etnaviv has advanced hugely since it was covered by Phoronix in January. He's right that it isn't upstreamed, but it does actual GLES2 (GLES1 untested) rendering now. I'm not sure at which phase I should request upstream merging, but now I'm still making large numbers of changes and removing kludges and shunts I created in the beginning, so I don't think it's that time yet.

                My next steps are to find and kill the remaining rendering bugs, to have decent full-screen rendering to be able to run a few games succesfully on the gcwzero/cubox, after that I'll bother with X11.

                Anyway I'm happy to see the project mentioned at all.

                That said, reverse-engineering a GPU and then making a GL driver is a lot of work. It touches a lot of subject areas from compilers, hardware synchronization, to kernel programming. And getting a hang of Mesa's and Gallium inner workings was quite some effort too. And then the Vivante shader ISA is piece of cake compared to some out there, heh cwabott

                If I had some kind of funding and could work on it full time, we'd have had a
                full-fledged driver months ago, but I'm need to dedicate my scarce free time
                to it so have some patience please! Or better, join in and help.

                Comment

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