MOBLIN ZONE

Henry Kingman -

The Moblin Developer's mailing list has really picked up lately, with some fascinating exchanges telling the story of a quickly progressing technology. Here are two recent highlights.

Clutter reaches 1.0rc1 milestone

Intel's Emmanuele Bassi on Monday posted the news that Clutter 0.9.4 has been released for testing. He wrote, "This is a development release of Clutter 0.9 leading towards the 1.0 stable cycle. It is the first release candidate for the 1.0.0 release."

Clutter, of course, is a centerpiece Moblin technology aimed at helping user interface developers easily add 3D animations and other advanced graphical effects. Aiming beyond the traditional 2D "desktop" UI metaphor, it steps up to a "theatrical" metaphor in which 2D interface objects are likened to "actors" moving around on a 3D "stage," with the developer playing the role of "director."

Written in C, with a "familiar" GTK+-like API and bindings for a host of development and scripting languages, Clutter aims to mask the complexities of OpenGL (or OpenGL ES for smaller embedded devices). An available (and newly updated) Clutter-GTK+ library helps developers embed Clutter stages within GTK+ containers, and inherit colors and graphics such as icons from the GTK+ app.

Clutter plays well with all of GTK+'s familiar FreeDesktop.org friends, too, including DBUS (system message bus), Pango (internationalization), Cairo (graphics rendering), and GStreamer (media streaming). It runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. 

The new 1.0.0rc1 release is binary and source-compatible with the current stable release, version 0.8, according to Bassi, and can even be installed in parallel with 0.8. As ever, the code is available under the commerce-friendly LGPL 2.1 license.

Learn all about Clutter 0.9.4's new features in Bassi's post to the Moblin Dev and Clutter mailing lists, here and here.

Non-Intel graphics support gains ahead?

Dev mailing list users are reporting varying levels of success porting Moblin to devices that wed Atom CPUs with Nvidia Ion GPUs. One such device, the Acer Aspire Revo -- was previewed back in April on Gizmodo, which lauded its performance with hardware-accelerated HD video content like Bluray. Less stellar, reportedly, was playback of software-accelerated HD content, which as of today unfortunately includes Flash and Silverlight, the two top streaming Internet video technologies. Adobe, Microsoft... any plans to teach future versions of these ubiquitous technologies to speak directly to graphics hardware?

According to Gizmodo, "Ion" is Nvidia's embedded branding for the GeForce 9400M, a chip dubbed a "motherboard GPU" by Nvidia, and reportedly tapped by Apple for late-model Macbooks sporting "MC79" chipsets. Under Linux, proprietary drivers are needed to unlock Ion's acceleration hardware. Under Moblin, it's also apparently necessary to recompile the X server to enable the xinerama extension. Since the X Window system is much larger and often more challenging to compile than the Linux kernel itself, it has been suggested on the list that Moblin enable xinerama by default in binary distributions. Proponents says this would facilitate Moblin's use with non-Intel graphics chips -- might be a nice nod to the newly vendor-neutral nature of Moblin, as it exists under the auspices of the Linux Foundation.

A full archive of the Moblin Dev list can be found here. Subscription information can be found here.

The Clutter mailing list archive resides here.