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Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Xgl

Modern graphic cards consist of 90% 3D hardware and 10% 2D, just for the sake of backward compatibility, but so far only the games used the 3D hardware !

Here comes Xgl. Instead of having boring 2D windows, it uses full 3D to achieve a lot of cool effects, some of them ever actually useful:

  • multidesktop cube
  • real transparency (alt+mouse wheel over any window), if you have too many windows open
  • instant zooming by mouse wheel (so useful for webcomics that have small fonts)
  • and of course plenty of eye candy :-D
The cool stuff can't be presented on a screenshot, you simply have to try it on your own. Or at least watch a movie.

Unfortunately, Xgl is still quite difficult to configure. The solution is, as usual, downloading a LiveCD. Kororaa LiveCD comes with preconfigured Xgl, it should work on most ATI, nVidia and even some Intel graphic cards. Enjoy :-)

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