netbook-launcher does not support 2D only

[draft]

UNR has some nice 3D effects. However, UNR's target is to run on small and mobile devices with limited battery power. Currently, the Intel graphic cards draw more power in 3D than 2D (http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/known.php). Thus, it would be nice to have UNR working with 2D only as well with some nice icon effects.

[Bill Filler (bfiller)]

We have plans to do the following which may help address this issue:
make launcher auto-detect GL capabilities of system it is running on, and use minimal set in VM/Limited environments. This could possibly be enhanced to use a gconf key to trigger running with minimal 3D effects.

[Bill Filler (bfiller)]

This info may be useful from bug 271798:
To find out the status of software versus hardware rendering, I usually do a:
glxinfo |grep direct
If "direct rendering: No" then you're using software rendering...

[draft (ridershome)]

Great. This would help a lot! It was reported that disabling 3D can save power with an acer aspire one netbook. (http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=7821&start=20)

From the forum:
"Disabling 3D saves 0.6W. Added option "NoDRI" in xorg.conf (powertop 8.9W -> 8.3W). This causes some artifacts on Netbook launcher and makes it unresponsible."

[Neil J. Patel (njpatel)]

To be absolutely clear:

We're not making a 2D version of the launcher, that would require a completely new front-end in Gtk. What we are hoping to do is to determine the current 3D acceleration capabilities, and throttle the animations to match. This would mean that, if the launcher could determine it is running on software rendering, then it would switch off animations.

In addition to automatically checking if we're on software rendering, there will be an option in gconf to force this behaviour for those that want/need it.

[draft (ridershome)]

OK, I'm not a Gtk pro and I don't know the implementation details about UNR, but isn't the animation the only thing that needs 3D in the current version? If this animation could be something easier for those netbooks with software 3D, such as changing background or similar, that would help and I think this would not require to rewrite the launcher front-end.

[Neil J. Patel (njpatel)]

Right, that is what is being proposed. However, that doesn't meant hat it will be as quick as Gtk because everytime the gl 'scene' changes, the software has to recompute what to display. However, I am hopeful that by cutting out the animations and therefore decreasing the amount of scene changes, we'll get a bump in performance.

[Neil J. Patel (njpatel)]

If glxinfo | grep "direct rendering" returns "No", or if /apps/netbook-launcher/force_low_graphics is set to TRUE in gconf then the "low graphics mode" of the launcher will be enabled.

When in this mode:
  - No animations are run (everything is
  - Motion events are disabled (no hover effects)

This increases the performance of the launcher when there is no hardware acceleration for 3D, or if your using fast-user-switching. However, as I mentioned before, this is not a magic fix for 2d support. It's still slow and will be until Mesa is updated to make software rendering quicker on Linux.

[Paul Larson (pwlars)]

This bug has been moved to Ubuntu distribution