Sun Ray, xrender and KDE4

Hi all,

Sun produces diskless desktop units by the name of Sun Ray. They are
essentially a graphics card and a few usb ports in a plastic box. It is
possible to install the RedHat SSRS (Sun Ray Server Software) on Debian
that brings the display from the server to a Sun Ray DTU (desktop unit)
driven monitor. I like them because they need little energy and emit 0dB
of noise. They utilize pulse audio.

Here is the problem: The SRSS X-Server has no XRENDER extension and KDE4
is virtually unusable because of that. The texture and colors of window
edges and buttons are displayed in a coarse and distorted manner, and
plasma is made up from grey, black and colored noise in which not even
buttons can be discriminated. Widgets placed on the desktop w/o plasma
are virtually unusable as well. Due to varying hard coded color masks in
QT4 libraries Gwenview's color mask is ok for the thumbnails but the
images proper are being shown with RGB-inversion, a problem that
prevails with most but not all Flashplayer versions as well due to the
SSRS specs.

I wonder, are these all limitations that cannot be overcome? Who of the
KDE developers would be the right person to address? Is KDE4 just not
for Sun Ray setups? This would be the first time IMHO that a desktop
environment would be unusable not because of hardware limitations but
because of its way of rendering textures. It seems Sun will not change
SSRS because of backward compatibility and man hour issues.

Greetings

Andreas


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On Saturday, 2009-10-17, Andreas v. Heydwolff wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Sun produces diskless desktop units by the name of Sun Ray. They are
> essentially a graphics card and a few usb ports in a plastic box. It is
> possible to install the RedHat SSRS (Sun Ray Server Software) on Debian
> that brings the display from the server to a Sun Ray DTU (desktop unit)
> driven monitor. I like them because they need little energy and emit 0dB
> of noise. They utilize pulse audio.
>
> Here is the problem: The SRSS X-Server has no XRENDER extension and KDE4
> is virtually unusable because of that. The texture and colors of window
> edges and buttons are displayed in a coarse and distorted manner, and
> plasma is made up from grey, black and colored noise in which not even
> buttons can be discriminated. Widgets placed on the desktop w/o plasma
> are virtually unusable as well. Due to varying hard coded color masks in
> QT4 libraries Gwenview's color mask is ok for the thumbnails but the
> images proper are being shown with RGB-inversion, a problem that
> prevails with most but not all Flashplayer versions as well due to the
> SSRS specs.
>
> I wonder, are these all limitations that cannot be overcome? Who of the
> KDE developers would be the right person to address? Is KDE4 just not
> for Sun Ray setups? This would be the first time IMHO that a desktop
> environment would be unusable not because of hardware limitations but
> because of its way of rendering textures. It seems Sun will not change
> SSRS because of backward compatibility and man hour issues.

KDE/OpenSolaris developer Adriaan de Groot has a blog post on that subject:
http://blogs.fsfe.org/adridg/?p=298

Cheers,
Kevin