Re: [orca-list] is ubuntu 11.04 worth a try with Orca?

[Alan Bell <alanbell ubuntu com>]

Hi Alex and others,

I don't work for Canonical, I am just part of the community, I can't 
make changes to Unity or the overall strategy, I was just trying to 
describe the expected future direction from what I can see. It is pretty 
hard these days to purchase a computer that doesn't have 3d hardware. 
Any Intel motherboard from the Atom chip upwards has 3d, anything with 
an AMD or Nvidia card of any description does 3d. I actually think it is 
reasonable to suggest that right now it is *hard* to purchase anything 
that won't run Unity. It doesn't need good 3d, it doesn't need a 
screaming hot gaming rig, it just needs something that does a bit of 
OpenGL. I don't think anything with graphics on the motherboard won't do 
3d and I don't think you can buy a separate PCI card that won't do 3d. 
Having a look around the only Intel architecture things I can find that 
won't do 3d are really small almost embedded computers not based on 
standard motherboards which are designed to mount on the back of 
monitors. The other things that won't do 3d are ARM chip based devices. 
I expect the unity-2d effort is actually there because they need it to 
go on ARM based netbooks, however I am a bit surprised that there are 
not more ARM devices with 3d. Graphics chip designers kind of gave up on 
2d ages ago, there is now so much silicon on a GPU dedicated to throwing 
3d stuff about the screen that it is much faster to just treat 2d as 
just a special case of 3d where everything happens to be on a flat plane.

In terms of things that won't work the S3 graphic chipset from a few 
years back that uses the openchrome drivers probably won't work (they 
mostly have 3d hardware, but the driver for that part isn't fully 
there). AMD geode chip such as the OLPC XO-1 won't do it. Old Intel 
boards from the pre-netbook era probably won't work as there was a 
architecture in the Intel drivers that meant they stopped working with 
Compiz after about Hardy Heron (I have a basic Dell desktop from 2002 
that falls into this category - the hardware could run Unity, if the 
driver wasn't broken - actually I will check again and see if it has 
been fixed)

Alan.