Seasons Greetings,
Yesterday I had the opportunity to use a laptop that had a new enough ATI card to use the fglrx driver -- this has been the one remaining area that wNOP has failed in. I managed to install the driver and get Compiz-Fusion 'working' -- it wasn't pretty.
The point is, that in order for Compiz-Fusion to talk to its graphics card (whoever the manufacturer), one of two technologies must be running, either AIGLX or XGL. From the beginning I decided to work with AIGLX, as Puppy 3 comes with it already working perfectly. The problem is though, that ATI has only just began programming their drivers to support AIGLX! Pooh
Of course, we are not restricted to running ATI cards with ATI drivers, there is also the open source radeon driver, which has, somewhat ironically, supported AIGLX for ages and in most cases outperforms the ATI drivers. However, and this is the problem, the radeon driver does not support the more recent ATI cards. So a tricky situation.
Now, my primary aim for wNOP is that it supports all the graphics cards that are capable of running Compiz-Fusion. As far as I know there is no other LiveCD distro that is able to do this 'out of the box'. I haven't tried Austrumi yet, partly because of the language barrier but also because I find it hard to believe that it does what wNOP aims to do but in 67MB! Anyway, whether wNOP is the first or not, I feel it is a very realistic goal and something that a lot of people would appreciate. Both that Puppy is such a staggering feat of innovation and that Compiz-Fusion is such an enjoyable and original way of using a desktop -- an awesome combination in my opinion.
So I was just on the verge of releasing wNOP2, I had the ISO ready and everything, but now, after seeing fglrx and AIGLX in action for myself, I feel it would be best to change direction away from AIGLX and towards XGL. This is unfortunate for reasons other than extra work (not that I mind the learning experience!) -- (1) that AIGLX is really the more advanced and complete technology (2) that ATI will be working to improve support for AIGLX, but who knows how long that might take.
I have no experience with XGL nor recompiling Xorg, so it looks like it will be a fair amount of work. I don't know enough yet but maybe it is possible to have AIGLX and XGL on one system? That'd be perfect. So, I'll see how it goes, I think it would be good if I released what I have done as wNOP1.1
Okay, hope you all get great Christmas presents,
tom