Creative graphics linux OS -Project Genesis

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
61

Hi

I know it may be considered a gimmick (but a very very cool gimmick) but has anyone tried Xgl? It really is awesome and this Blender distro would be for visually minded people. And remember that Vista is “boasting” a new interface - well this is probably better!

http://www.novell.com/linux/xglrelease/

Check out the videos!

Utterly awesome.

If it seen as being an unneccessary CPU/GPU hog then it can be killed (and that is the beauty of linux).

Try out the liveCD here…(highly recommended)

If something like Kororaa (with Xgl) had Blender, Wings, SharpConstruct, Yafray, PovRay, Kino, Inkscape, GIMP, GIMP Gap, Verse and perhaps Sunflow (with the required JVM) along with standard things such as OpenOffice and Firefox then I wouldn’t hesitate.

Remember that if we are also promoting Blender with this we need something that will get people hooked. :smiley:

Koba

62

Oh my goodness Koba, that XGl stuff is pretty damn funky.

Animated min/max is nothing special, since MAC OSX does that. But what’s impressive isn’t the opacity stuff either - it’s that damn cool cube workspace idea.

It’s brilliant.

I use Ubuntu, and one thing I find useful are the multiple workspaces and being able to shift between 'em. But with this cube thing, it’s a little gimmicky sure, but I could imagine actually using it. :smiley:

63

It is awesome. :smiley:

I hope you tried the live CD cause those videos don’t do it justice - you need to try Xgl yourself. Oh and there is another feature not shown in the videos that make me shake windows about and curse when I am back on XP :smiley:

This LiveCD is spreading like wildfire in college…everyone so far has loved it! So try it! You won’t regret!

Here is the link again: http://getkororaa.com/

Koba

64

I’ve tried Kororaa and… Oh Boy! That xgl thing is sweet!
It’s the first LiveCD that came with Nvidia driver and it worked!

The cube desktop is awesome, very useful.
Downloaded Blender to play a little and it was quite good.
If I had discovered who to mount my HD in Gnome (first time gnome user), i should load some wip to see how the system handle the poly count.

For now, I’m waiting for some distro with KDE or Xfce to support Xgl to play somemore. :stuck_out_tongue:

65

If nothing else, the Kororaa Live CD shows that both Nvidia and ATI drivers can run right out the box on boot. That is impressive in its own right.

Xgl makes the general desktop experience much smoother and enabling video drivers can only be good for Blender and other visual apps.

Koba

66

Hey,

Sorry I didnt reply, I was away for the weekend.

For the render farm, the reason I was thinking dr queue is that when rendering a multifram animation and multiple animations, wouldnt it be faster to render the frames with dr queue, rather than set up open mosix to do so (as you wont need blender on the screen with dr queue, it will just use the render engine from blender)? Also, would you be able to line up jobs to be done?

Cool as far as ardour goes, now I’ll have to learn to use it :smiley: As far as VST/midi goes, I havent really done any audio on linux yet, and it would be sweet if someone who is pro at audio could help out, but if nobody does, when I get time (dunno when that will be) I will look into it.

Cool as far as DSL goes, but the other thing is the desktop, doesnt it run KDE? Again, I really urge you to boot into the enlightment 16 desktop in elive, as I find it is good at everything (looks good, fast and efficent). It also has awesome support for both ati and nvidia.

Kino is sweet for an NLE, you would know more about it than me anyhow, as I havent found a decent NLE, I have just done my editing in windows (premier).

Scribus - must have :smiley: I forgot to add that to the list, but if I put this on mums computer for her, she needs desktop publishing.

As far as the renderers go, most of them take up sutch a small space that we could put on a heap of them I think, as everyone has their own choice. But remember that you will need scripts for a lot to export from blender in the correct format.

Burp is a must have as well. Im keen to be able to set this up on a few computers to get credits with burp. Dont make it auto start with the computer though, as people that dont use burp wont want the cpu used for render I dont think.

Another program I would love is sharp construct http://sharp3d.sourceforge.net/, although I havent tried it yet, as I couldnt get it running in suse (and they didnt have a windows version last I checked, so I’ll try the windows version out now).

I also saw these 2 links in another post:
http://www.manucornet.net/Informatique/Texturize.php
http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer
They are pluggins for the gimp, I havent tried them yet, but they look cool.

I think thats about it for now,
MicWit

67

Hey guys we are rocking with ideas. Sorry I had forgotten to reply and then I was away. Anyways… those are reeea–ally amazing ideas there.

the sharp thing mentioned here is interesting.
but keep in mind fellows, making just making a just faster ui is not our aim(if we get started) we need to make the stuff needed by the raytracers HA, and so. The things like network rendering and clustering are very impressive. But we also need to keep compatibilty with some os, like linux, so that we do not have to write separate code for running application programs.

Oh, btw I have intermediate level OS (unix and general) knowledge, I do c/c++, java coding, graphics libs: OpenGL and some DirectX, also done a lil assembly lang coding. (language is not an issue)

also one thread to think on…
we can also embedd blender as a part of the OS, say our desktop will be a 3D blender scene, with os objects having a 3D blender object representation, that would be cracking cool… and one more thing, we could make the apis like ogl at the lower level (like longhorn) so that we could also enhance the Graphics performance on existing linux OS.

boy we are talking really big (implemetation is some task, but still we are talking)

c ya

68

We are basing it on one version of linux or the other, so there shouldnt need to be any extra coding to get anything running. The only extra scripts will be for import/export etc features that are written seperately, but then those scripts are generally already written.

I think the idea of doing the intro screen, icons and background(s) in blender (or at least all opensource programs) is great, however, that can be done by people without a c++ knowlege maybe, and down the track. I think 1st priority is to get the os working and released to the public, then the desktop “theme” can be changed down the track, then after that changes to the type of desktop used etc can be done if so wanted.

MicWit

69

hey MicWit,
Extending / modifying an existing lin is the optimum solution…

you got me wrong on the desktop thingy …
I actually meant that the window manager would be a 3D blender scene, which would consist of different OS objects that will have a blender object representation… (a 3D desktop (next gen)) :smiley:

In other words, blender would be running all the time in the OS while(true) :smiley:

and this would not be a mere art work,

cheers

70

ahh, I got ya now. I think that would be cool, however, it may have to be a mod version or something. It will chew more resources, and a few of the things I want to do with this os will need all the resources they can get. I think it would be cool if we got something up and running first, and then these mods can be done down the track, and put into a “less resource friendly but fun to play with” version :smiley:

I think its a cool idea, but who is going to code it?

MicWit

71

Yeah, using blender for a OS is a cool idea, but rather impractical. Now making a creative Linux distro is a good idea. And that is what we are shooting for.

Okay, I’m starting to formulate some ideas, but we will need some help here. From all you artists we need the following:

Logo
Bootspash screen
Splash Screen
Wallpaper
Theme ideas?

Goto KDE-look for ideas. I’m not an artist, so it’ up to you guys to provide this stuff.

72

Sweet, Im havent yet followed any of my works through to make a full scene, but I think this will be great motivation. I have been rather sick for the last few days, but as soon as Im better, I’ll get stuck into something (once I catch up on study)

MicWit

73

One thing I think that can be pretty cool is if the CD come bundeled with resources.

I am thinking as an example on a textur reposit; image maps; plugin’s and pythin scripts; models, …

another way would be to make the user able to reburn the distro with extra-folders of is choice (as I said previously dreamlinux seam to have this ability with is tool MKDistro)

that you will be able to make an all in one studio/distro with all your favorites recources at hand.

for the software I would like to see more software related to the movie-making process;

like Celtx for scripwriting

anyway a good site about movie-making on linux that refers a lot of software (free and commercial) and can be used as reference to tools to include:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Movie_Making_Manual-Linux_in_film_production

and another site with a compheensive list (2nd post):
http://www.linuxforum.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=53452

74

I already can do this with my usb flash drive. I have a copy of blender on it and it loads on any pc in seconds. Runs nicely too!

75

Someone mentioned having midi software, the best one I’ve found is Rosegarden. Unfortunately it uses qt, while the gimp uses GTK. That would mean having both libraries and add to the bloat factor of the distro.

Hydrogen is another good choice - it’s a very handy drum machine.

timidity would be usefull, since many people have only a built in sound chip, and they sound crappy. timidity can use Soundfonts, and there’s tons of them available for free.

Last I checked, I couldn’t get VST plugins working, but AFAIK both Audacity and Ardour can use LADSPA plugins, many of which are freely available.

You may also consider Stompboxes, a “machine” type synth along the lines of Jescola Buzz.

Tommy

76

woohoo, we need a good drum machine. I’ll try find time to check it out, but doubt it will be for a while.

77

How should we call the OS?

“ART-OS” ?

So basically a linux distro with all you need to do artsy stuff like GIMP, Blender, etc…
In short the following types of software:
3D imaging
2D imaging
Film and effects
Audio software

Added bonus: included Burp, or even better a new “all purposes network renderer” (to render movies, images, etc… through network rendering on the same principles of Burp).

If it fits on one CD, that would be nice, One DVD would be the max, running from DVD drive would be nice, having an install to hard disk and auto-detection install (much like knoppix) would boost the distro (lots of people want to use linux without taking a week for OS optimisation/instalation ).
The real nifty thing would be to have an update/compile *all to this specific hardware feature like gentoo. Or an option menu at boot: “optimise for 3D imaging” “optimise for 2D imaging” “optimise for audio processing” “Gimme everything you’ve got”.

78

Personally I like the sound of “Blender-OS” - I know Blender isn’t the only thing on it but seeing this is being created mainly with Blender in mind, I think it is fair enough.

Of course you could interpret “OS” as “Open Source” instead of “Operating System” if you so wish.

Koba

79

Starting to build the CD today. Since we are not going for super small, I’m basing it off of plain Debian.

80

BTW. my goal is to make this one of the best looking Live CDs available. Any suggestions for slick looking themes for Gnome?