Xara Xtreme is back. After 20 years. With a vengeance.
Classic Xara vector editing, revived for Linux — now with experimental local AI-assisted drawing.
Project Vengeance revives Xara Xtreme LX as a native Linux vector graphics editor, preserving its original interface, native editable objects and CDraw 4.4 engine. The proposed first release is v0.1.0-beta.1, a source-only beta.
AI-assisted vector drawing — powered by local Ollama
The experimental AI Assistant connects to locally running Ollama, without
requiring a cloud AI service. It has been tested with qwen2.5-coder:7b.
Unlike AI image generators that produce flattened bitmaps, this assistant creates native, editable Xara vector objects in the current document. You can move, recolour, resize and edit the individual objects normally, with Undo/Redo.
For example, an illustrative drawing request is:
Draw a simple house with a red roof, blue windows and a green door.
The Assistant proposes a structured scene. Review the proposal, then click Apply to explicitly approve document changes. This prompt is illustrative, not a verified exact-output guarantee: the current natural-language implementation supports a validated subset of drawing operations, principally rectangles and ellipses. Unsupported geometry or invalid model output is rejected rather than executed. It is an early foundation for AI-assisted vector editing, not a general-purpose autonomous design agent.
See local Ollama setup and the optional Ollama testing guide.
- Build and run on Linux
- Release notes and known limitations
- Linux testing guide for Chris
- Release-readiness summary
- Third-party licenses
- CDraw redistribution conditions
GDraw is the default renderer. Cairo is an experimental hybrid backend that falls back to GDraw. The optional local Ollama AI Assistant creates validated, native editable objects with explicit Apply and Undo/Redo. Neither experimental feature implies full renderer parity or unrestricted AI control.
The tested target is Ubuntu 22.04/Bodhi x86_64, wxGTK 3.0.5 and X11. Use disposable documents, save often, and read the limitations. PDF export is raster; SVG and native vector PDF are unsupported in the tested configuration. No portable binary package, system installation or bit-for-bit build reproducibility is claimed.
Credit and licensing
This is an independent derivative, not an official Xara product. Original Xara Group copyrights and contributor notices are retained; see AUTHORS and source headers. Historical upstream: https://github.com/samuell/xara-xtreme. Improvements may be contributed upstream subject to upstream requirements.
Application source is GPLv2 with the additional permissions in LICENSE. CDraw is proprietary and conditionally redistributable with the complete GPLv2 Xara derivative source/package under libs/LIBS-LICENSE, not as a standalone library. This distribution is not uniformly open source. All original license texts, approved logo bytes and attribution are preserved. Software licenses do not grant trademark rights; artwork/trademark clearance is not independently certified.
Source identity
Native code, libraries, resources, build scripts and tests match frozen source
commit 1e00daef7996c88c5b003d125a2427052bb9bf0c. Only README/release documentation
and private release-harness/report exclusions differ in this public packaging.
The exact frozen-source build passed focused GDraw GUI acceptance. A new public
package has a separate checksum; the older private frozen tarball is not uploaded.
This repository has a fresh public snapshot history, with original history safely
preserved privately. It does not contain private diagnostics or recovery bundles.