Nodding asleep in the hotel lobby, the only place in Birmingham which seems to have reliable Internet. Just posted the slides from my GUADEC Keynote this afternoon.
Check them out if you’re looking to understand a little more of the reasoning behind this crazy Pyro thing…
Last night I was up late night whipping the the demo into good shape, reviewing slides, rebuilding everything without debugging to get decent performance, and practicing the planned live-action hack of a Google Map directly into the desktop with a couple lines of HTML.
Turns out they show Star Trek TNG on repeat on one of the BBC channels after about 4am. Who knew!
Possibly relatedly, the talk was delivered a bit beneath my usual energy levels. It seemed to go over pretty well though. I’ve heard everything from “insanely great”, to “I thought he was nuts until the demo started”, all the way to “a mitigated disaster”.
Luckily, I came in expecting much worse from a bold proposal for the future of the Linux Desktop. Check the slides to see some of what I’m getting at.
Unfortunately, the talk was cut off running overtime before I could get to show some of the crazy-cool dead-easy web-integration that having a desktop entirely rendered by a Web browser allows.
But I at least got to show the ‘’standard” desktop effects… like our Expose-alike (clocking in at a whooping 400 lines of JavaScript) and the window picker (253 lines). All on a full desktop with the panel, nautilus, a terminal, and gedit running and fully usable. All rendered entirely by Firefox via the Pyro Compzilla extension.
Proof that Chris and I aren’t entirely insane at least! 
Not all is lost however… it seems like there is plenty of desire in having another Pyro talk to explain a bit about how it works, and to show some of the Web integration abilities.
Hopefully I’ll be able to show Chris’ latest Flickr integration Add-on too.
But for now, Zzzzzz.
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Man, I hope somebody videotaped this one…
Congratulations you guys!
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Interesting idea but I’m wondering if this is really feasible. I tried it on my box and it was pushing
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… Ok so this version of WordPress does not like the less-than sign …
Interesting idea but I’m wondering if this is really feasible. I tried it on my box and it was pushing less than 0.5fps. Good thing Linux has VTs because I could not kill it from inside X due to the sluggish response. FWIW, Compiz Fusion has no problem hitting 80fps on my card.
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I’m incredulous about this one, but thank you for being crazy enough to try all the wacky things that may completely change the world
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definitely the hack of the year
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@Chris: Wow! You got it working! That’s like *huge*. Now, performance wise, I wonder what the issue is… what version of Firefox? What distro, or did you build FF yourself? Does your X server have composite and render enabled?
Try running this to get debugging spew:
NSPR_LOG_MODULES=”compzilla:10″ firefox -chrome chrome://compzilla/content/start.xul 2>&1 > /tmp/pyro.logAnd send that to me, or to the pyro list?
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I’m wondering, why do you think it’s so cool, the same thing already existed in windows 95, I believe, it’s called “ActiveDesktop” or something like that.
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Any chance of some screencasts of things like the gMap hackso we can see this thing in action?
@Zs:
I think this differs from Active Desktop in that it controls *everything*, that’s the actual windows as well as the desktop itself. You can see this from things like the expose-alike and window picker screenshots. -
orph: Yes, I have composite and render. (I doubt Compiz would be happy without those.) I’m using Iceweasel from Debian Lenny. I’ll get a log when I’m back on my box.
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pyrodesktop.org is down. It got slashdotted and ended up as front page linux news at google news. Perhaps that’s why.
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Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! zchlpxopwwit
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