metisse 0.3.5 review

Metisse is constituted by a virtual X server called Xwnc, a special version of FVWM and an FVWM module FvwmAmetista (after Ametista)

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 4391K Developer: Olivier Chapuis

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Metisse is constituted by a virtual X server called Xwnc, a special version of FVWM and an FVWM module FvwmAmetista (after Ametista). Metisse is a free software developed under the GNU General Public License.

Xwnc is a mix of Xvnc and XDarwin. It draws nothing on your screen, every things is drawn into pixmaps. Similarly as Xvnc, but with a different protocol, Xwnc can send these pixmaps (and others information) to a "viewer". FvwmAmetista is such a viewer, it uses OpenGL (via nucleo) for rendering the X desktop into a window of a "regular" 3D accelerated X server.

Installation

You need the Nucleo library installed on your system. For version 0.3.5 you must use nucleo-0.1-20041216. The compilation and installation of nucleo is easy, the usual sequence

./configure; make; su; make install"

should work. The nucleo-config script should be in your PATH.

It is recommanded to install the wm-icons package and to have xclock and xload.

As usual, for preparing the build type:

./configure --prefix=where_you_want_to_install [other relevant options]

the default Xwnc font path is

/usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc,/usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi,/usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi

you may change this path with the --font-path option. Similarly, you may have to use the "--with-fontenc-file" option if your font encoding directory file is not at /usr/lib/X11/fonts/encodings/encodings.dir.

To enable GLX support (for OpenGL applications) use --enable-glx or --enable-glx-x86 (for a x86 cpu). The OpenGL rendering is not accelerated. Note that glxgear does not work very well for now. The other mesa demo programs work fine as well as the xlock 3D demo but "invert" which crashes Xwnc.

Type

configure --help=recursive

for the full list of options to configure.

Then:

make
su # if needed
make install

Note that the metisse modified FVWM does not replace your regular FVWM. The fvwm executable is called fvwmi and the modules are under prefix/libexec/fvwm-insitu/X.Y.Z/

What's New in This Release:
An Xwnc crash caused by off pixmap rendering was fixed. A depth 16 Xwnc crash was fixed (Xwnc can be ran at depth 16 again). Some gcc-3.4 mmx code from Xorg (for composite operation and filling) was added (small speed improvement). FvwmAmetista Image encoding handling was improved.