WARNING: no actual information here, just thinking out loud.
On Mon, Oct 16, 2000 at 04:45:20PM -0700, Gordon Messmer wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Oct 2000, cristian wrote:
>
> > Maybe some of you tried it. Would it be possible to
> > achieve the same multimedia machine using RedHat ?
>
> I doubt it. Be's native API is really geared toward threaded
> applications, and it has a very fast windowing system. X is probably
> going to bottleneck a lot of the stuff that BeOS does just to show
> off.
I've wondered about this myself. SGI based a significant portion of
their business on multimedia Unix boxes; granted the OS they used was
IRIX and the platform was mostly MIPS, and SGI is now headed directly for
the dustbin, so I wouldn't recommend that anybody actually buy an SGI
machine for anything real these days. (On that note, Be ain't doing so
hot either last I checked.)
But SGI proved it could be done long before there was a BeOS. Linux seems
to be going pretty strong these days, modern hardware is fast enough to get
around some of X's bottlenecks (provided you're running X server and client
on the same machine, at least), or there are some alternative windowing
systems coming up (I've not tried any of them) which promise better
performance than X can put out.
A lot of the development in recent kernel versions has promoted multimedia.
Video now has kernel-level support depending on the card you have. Sound
has been getting better.
As SGI spirals downward, they appear to be trying to get as much of their
technology out in the open as they can, before the company goes away.
Probably the best example of this is their release of IRIX's filesystem
and volume management software into open source, but there has been other
stuff as well IIRC.
Game developers, most notably Loki, have gotten good results porting some
fairly graphically-intensive games to Linux, and they make at least some of
their in-house tools public. Other tools like Crystal Space seem to be
making good headway as well.
So my view as an interested spectator is that Linux _could_ be made into
a dynamite multimedia platform. But don't expect to find "Multimedia
Development Workstation" as one of the installation choices in the next
release of Red Hat. It will take some work. At least some software hunting
and system tweaking, possibly some of one's own coding, possibly some
specialized hardware (with all the caveats about getting odd hardware to
work under an open-source OS).
So, that's "could". As one recent American president was quoted as
saying, "The waste from one year's operation of a nuclear power plant
could fit under this desk." Yeah, could. Doesn't, but with proper changes
and planning and a little luck, it _could_.
--
Michael Jinks, IB
But let your communication be Yea, yea; nay, nay:
for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.
-- Matthew 5:37
And thus did the New Testament endorse binary computing.
_______________________________________________
Redhat-list mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
