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Of course NeWS had interesting ideas (but wasn't opensource, so died).

The Berlin server could have been an interesting alternative. Unfortunately, it seems stalled, and the design around CORBA might be wrong. I definitely think that a GUI server should be protocol based (like PicoGUI and X11)!

An alternative could be to write a widget server running under X11. I actually did code (under GPL) such a stuff see Guis and Guis page for details and downloading. Please send me any feedbacks!

Guis's main ideas are: requests from client to GUIS are on a pipe, carrying Lua script for GTK2. replies from GUIS to client are either XML or Lispy syntax.

Xemacs might claim to be (also) a widget server.

Actually, I also think that the current widgets available in toolkits are unappropriate. I am missing a generic structured editor widget (able to edit generic syntax trees, perhaps with an XML representation).

Some think Berlin is the answer, but it doesn't look like much has changed since February.

some more info here

We have Berlin after all. =P

What bullshit. X, the protocol, is great. XFree86, the implementation, is pure shit. XFree86's codebase is larger and older than the linux kernel codebase. I wouldn't be surprised to hear it's larger than all the basic GNU tools combined (binutils, gcc, fileutils, gmake, etc)

The point is, XF86 is what sucks, not the underlying protocol. X is a Good Thing, and the only possible replacement is Berlin Fresco

... but this book is a excellent documentation for Fresco (formerly known as Berlin).

Sorry, coudln't resist, feel free to mod me down.

Regards,
Tobias

There are a lot of people whining about X (myself included). Most people say X is (take your pick) bloated, slow, obsolete, inefficient, or hopeless. Now some of these individual claims may have some truth to them, but the fact is that X despite its knarliness, works, and it works today. There isn't any real alternative, and it can continue to be extended for a long time.

But people who say such things about X are missing the point. X is ugly, in the same way that x86 is ugly. I think the analogy is a very apt one. Both are rather old designs, both are the most prevalent, both have had to be extended numerous times (and successfully), and both work, and work quite well. But neither one will get any design awards: the only thing we're doing at this point with either of these is leveraging the existing code base (i.e., the millions of x86 binaries on the one hand and X applications on the other) and avoiding duplication of past work by building something from scratch. And frankly, I think both are beginning to reach the end of the line: the further we go, the more effort we need to expend for an increasingly marginal return.

For the x86 example, Intel perceives this, and wants to jump ship now, even though its replacement is not as robust, fast, or powerful as its last top of the line. Once again, people who point this fact out are missing the point: Intel is laying down a roadmap, to service a broader goal of an architecture it can grow with for the next decade or more.

Why can't we do the same with X? It's going to get harder and harder to grow with X, so lets lay some groundwork now for a window system we can grow with for the next decade or more.

I am shocked and amazed that more comments are not mentioning Berlin, that is, Fresco. Do people not know about this? This is the only project I've found that has half a chance of being a suitable replacement for X. There's a framework there, a coherent vision, and even a basic running system. This isn't vapor, folks, or are these people a bunch of anti-X whiners with no code to back up their pointless bitching. They're not FUD-mongers; at least listen to their well-balanced (I think) justification as to why they're working on this project. It's quite easy to see that they're not at all motivated by hatred of X, but by a desire to design an elegant and network-transparent window system.

Why don't we have more of that nowadays? Half the OSS movement seems to be driven by hatred of Microsoft (or simply closed-source software), rather than love of elegant, useful, robust code born of honest work. At some point someone is going to have to worry about more than simply getting things done as quickly as possible, be-damned-how-it-works, and think more about design and the way things should be. The former type of attitude breeds stuff like MS Windows. Is that really what you want your windowing system to become? If something isn't done before long, X is going to be just like Windows: pasted and taped together and building on a merely serviceable codebase. This, I think, would be a great injustice to X. Let it die a peaceful and honorable death now, rather than a violent and hate-filled one later when it becomes so horrible, so monstrous, that the issue of replacing it is forced upon us and we throw its head on the guillotine.

Remember that at its inception X itself was merely a design framework by people who wanted to do a windowing system the right way. That X has served so well for so long is a testament to that foresight. But please, let us have the foresight to know when to design something new on that same basis, learning from what we have done. A rejection of the code does not mean a rejection of the vision or of the talent that bore that code.

How's this for a pretty, productive environment?

When will somebody free the world of X11 and write a light-weight fast and efficient graphics layer for Linux, one that would be friendly to manufacturers and acceleration modules...

The answer to your question is here.

right? :-)

I mean, really, what was the last 'innovation' that occured in the *nix /world?

Jeez... are you serious? Come on, Unix is one of the more important platforms for research, if not the most important. It is flexible, it is reliable, most of the scientific community is familiar with it. And these days it is also free!

Just talking about Linux I could point you to Berlin, some guys with rather interesting ideas for building user interfaces. Or the Beowulf Project, for massive distributed computing. Or RTLinux (and KURT), for full featured real-time operating systems. How about ReiserFS, that takes database-like balanced trees to the filesystem level. Or SELinux, a research prototype of a high-security operating system.

And the list goes on and on (forgive me for not looking up links, go Google for these ones): SPIN (a dynamically extensible operating system written in Modula-3, runs on Linux), all the research stuff at Mosix (including distributed shared memory, grid management, network RAM and more), the Hello Project (an operating system in Standard ML atop Linux), all the emulation stuff which hardly needs to be introduced, and all the kernel work for supporting different processor architectures.

Also note BDS's Kame Project, an advanced implementation of IPV6 and IPSec; the evolutionary scheduler for Linux; the networking kernel stuff, including the QoS work; OpenBIOS; the User-mode Linux kernel. Look up also the "C10K problem" for an interesting paper on server performance, (and while you're on that, khttpd and TUX kernel webservers).

Unix gave you the Internet, for root's sake. How much more "innovative" does it needs to get?

How about A) A graphics layer worth shit?

And if you like it then read here:

Berlin is a windowing system derived from Fresco, a powerful structured graphics toolkit originally based on InterViews. Berlin extends Fresco to the status of a full windowing system, in command of the video hardware (via GGI, SDL, DirectFB or GLUT) and processing user input directly rather than peering with a host windowing system. Additionally, Berlin's extensions include a rich drawing interface with multiple backends, an upgrade to modern CORBA standards, a new Unicode-capable text system, dynamic module loading, and many communication abstractions for connecting other processes to the server. It is developed entirely by volunteers on the internet, using free software, and released under the GNU Library General Public License.

"Hi. I'm Steve Jobs, and here at Apple we've done in 1 year or less what the Berlin Group has been trying to do for years now."

There are two X11 replacements that come to mind .... Berlin and Crust.

I don't think so.

From Berlin's home page:

Berlin is a windowing system derived from Fresco, a powerful structured graphics toolkit originally based on InterViews. Berlin extends Fresco to the status of a full windowing system, in command of the video hardware (via GGI, SDL, DirectFB or GLUT) and processing user input directly rather than peering with a host windowing system. Additionally, Berlin's extensions include a rich drawing interface with multiple backends, an upgrade to modern CORBA standards, a new Unicode-capable text system, dynamic module loading, and many communication abstractions for connecting other processes to the server. It is developed entirely by volunteers on the internet, using free software, and released under the GNU Library General Public License.

• Berlin Consortium
• QTopia
• PicoGUI
• Relevant Freshmeat Trove
• Google's Linux specific engine results

There were endless discussions of Berlin, and how it was going to sweep Linux and the BSD's into the graphical future, from the chains of a graphical past.

X is still here in 2002, and its progeny will be in place 15 years from now. It will be worked on by CS students who got their MS working on various "Berlin's".

BTW: Who remembers Sun's NeWS - a DPS-based windowing system with network transparency? Why doesn't Apple license the old sources for a model at extending Aqua on the wire? They will just re-invent this stuff again on the Quartz layer of 2005. Oh, well....

You mean a project to convert X11 into an OpenGL stream (which is basicaly what QE does), or do you want Quartz on Linux?

I seriously doubt there is either going on, although the Berlin Project might bring it closer to reality.

These days I tend to use Mandrake Linux, which usually sets up X and the monitor and mouse automatically.

I first used X (not XFree86) in 1988 or so, on a 386 with a horribly expensive video card. But it worked.

I still have some binaries from 1990 or so (SPARC, SunOS 4) that still run and talk to the X server. For that matter I still have some NeWS programs (like display PostScript) that don't run because NeWS died.

So, it's cool that we're finally getting antialiasing, downloadable outline fonts, and maybe even user-defined server-side graphics paths. Welcome to 1990. Ten years old, but with a lot of catching up to do.

In other areas, like Keith Packard's new XML-based configuration format, XFree86 is setting trends for the rest of Unix/Linux to follow. And where it's behind, it's being worked on.

It'll be interesting to see if X has enough momentum (I think it does) that Berin will die too, a footnote because not mainstream enough. just like NeWS.

NeWS was trivial to install, no config file at all. Installation matters, but applications matter more.

And, of course, Berlin, which happens to rock hard.

Berlin?

If IE's Windows integration is a monopoly, then I'm all for the removal of Konqueror from KDE

Go take a look at the Berlin Consortium. Berlin could eventually replace X. It could have an X compatibility layer, it is speedier, gives a consistent look on all apps. However, it needs much more development.

Berlin is a windowing system derived from Fresco, a powerful structured graphics toolkit originally based on InterViews. Berlin extends Fresco to the status of a full windowing system, in command of the video hardware (via GGI, SDL, DirectFB or GLUT) and processing user input directly rather than peering with a host windowing system. Additionally, Berlin's extensions include a rich drawing interface with multiple backends, an upgrade to modern CORBA standards, a new Unicode-capable text system, dynamic module loading, and many communication abstractions for connecting other processes to the server. It is developed entirely by volunteers on the internet, using free software, and released under the GNU Library General Public License.

Berlin FAQ

Berlin vs X

Go take a look at the Berlin Consortium. Berlin could eventually replace X. It could have an X compatibility layer, it is speedier, gives a consistent look on all apps. However, it needs much more development.

Berlin is a windowing system derived from Fresco, a powerful structured graphics toolkit originally based on InterViews. Berlin extends Fresco to the status of a full windowing system, in command of the video hardware (via GGI, SDL, DirectFB or GLUT) and processing user input directly rather than peering with a host windowing system. Additionally, Berlin's extensions include a rich drawing interface with multiple backends, an upgrade to modern CORBA standards, a new Unicode-capable text system, dynamic module loading, and many communication abstractions for connecting other processes to the server. It is developed entirely by volunteers on the internet, using free software, and released under the GNU Library General Public License.

Berlin FAQ

Berlin vs X

Go take a look at the Berlin Consortium. Berlin could eventually replace X. It could have an X compatibility layer, it is speedier, gives a consistent look on all apps. However, it needs much more development.

Berlin is a windowing system derived from Fresco, a powerful structured graphics toolkit originally based on InterViews. Berlin extends Fresco to the status of a full windowing system, in command of the video hardware (via GGI, SDL, DirectFB or GLUT) and processing user input directly rather than peering with a host windowing system. Additionally, Berlin's extensions include a rich drawing interface with multiple backends, an upgrade to modern CORBA standards, a new Unicode-capable text system, dynamic module loading, and many communication abstractions for connecting other processes to the server. It is developed entirely by volunteers on the internet, using free software, and released under the GNU Library General Public License.

Berlin FAQ

Berlin vs X

There are two main contenders for possible replacements for X, but both are not ready at all.

1. theres the berlin project, mentioned on /. b4
2. the Linux Kernel FB is pretty much ready to build a wm for, all though i dont know if any one has, i know there is a widget lib though, wslib or something like that.

-Trevelyan

Have you heard of berlin? There's also an article on linuxtoday...

Better yet, have a look at Berlin, not only do they already run on OpenGL, their design is also sane.

/Erik

Gnome and KDE are not windowing systems. The X window system and Berlin are.

No, please, not another windowing system. X11 is fine for most purposes and, if you need something is does not provide, write an extension. There are more than enough 'alternatives' that are either designed for niches, have never been finished or will never get a significant marekt share. They don't have any significant advantage, at least as a general window system, and they lack applications. And despite those people who claim that X11 is sooo bloated (usually because they see the memory usage and do not realize that most of the memory is taken by pixmaps that won't take less space in other solutions) there are proofs like TinyX and WeirdX.

Well, if you mean in an overall sense (you don't want X at all), then there is Berlin, but I don't think it is very far along. If you don't like XFree86 there are some commercial X versions like MetroX. I'm sure there are more, but their name popped into my head.

Check out Berlin. XFree86 has to stick to the X11R6 specifications. Or else it is X no more.

Coupla points:
1) Actually, 3D meshes perfectly with absolute measurement systems, since 3D has never used pixels. OpenGL, for example, is enitrely based on abstract units.
2) I think Berlin does this.

What color is the sky on your world? Or are you just installing it on a dual-1GHz box with 1024M RAM? Just like that, you lose all credibility.

Remove X

You say this several times. This really makes you look like a dumbass when you claim in later posts you only want an alternative. Speaking of which, look at Berlin for one alternative (there are others, that's just the first i came up with).

OpenOffice is pretty good, but its NOT MS Office

If you want MS Office, you know where to find it. It's really difficult to take seriously the claims that "Linux has no good office suite" when 'good' is defined as 'MS Office'. I'll concede that Linux doesn't have MS Office, and to any other suite you can validly claim "But it's not MS Office".

A discussion as to whether MS Office is actually desirable for anything beyond compatibility with MS Office could prove useful, but as I haven't tried any office suite lately I'm not in a position to say much. LyX does everything I need, document-wise.

No good browser

Again, if you define 'good' as being 'MS Internet Explorer', there's not much I can say. Please note that "Site X looks like crap under [non-IE browser], but looks fine under IE" isn't terribly convincing unless you also show that site X follows the published standards rather than relying on the various bugs and 'features' specific to IE.

Fonts suck

It all depends on which fonts you have installed, which font handlers you have installed (XFree86 freetype or xtt, or some other library? Using anti-aliasing?). My fonts tend to look fine, except on certain websites which were designed for fonts which I don't have on my machine.

KDE and GNOME desktop's look like crap

Ok, I'll agree with this one. Then again, I think most Windows and Mac desktops look like crap as well. Mac OS X looks pretty nice though. I prefer WindowMaker on my own machine. There's also Blackbox, Sawfish, Fvwm, Fvwm2, and many other window managers available.

Of course, everything can be reconfigured to one extent or another to suit individual tastes. Many of the Linux offerings more so than Windows.

No good printing

I can't speak for others, but whenever I have to print anything complex on a Windows machine I wish for the power of my Linux box. Print to postscript, view in gv for a good enough "print prievew" for my purposes, manipulate with psnup or a2ps, gzip or convert to pdf for posting online, and so on. Under Windows, everything depends on the application or on the particular printer driver, beyond that there's no way to view or manipulate the output.

Oh, and perhaps I should mention that my crappy little Epson printer doesn't have a postscript interpreter, but things come out as expected modulo mechanical failures.

[competition in desktops/graphical environments]

Is there a particular reason you think competition is bad?

standardize on one low-level graphical kernel

Yes, my servers definately need a graphical kernel.../SARCASM>

Standardize on one API layer for the GUI, much like Win32

Since when does Win32 have one API layer for the GUI? Or even just one API layer distributed by Microsoft? Hint: MFC isn't the only layer available.

["solutions" 3: "Have IBM marketing sell it"]

How exactly is that a suggestion anyone besides IBM can impliment? So the rest of us should do nothing then? Bah...

["solution" 4: "killer app" again]

Why don't you write that "Killer app"? It's not like we're all sitting here and thinking "Yes, we COULD write that killer app we have plans for, but we'd rather write more desktop suites".

["solution" 5: "X sucks" and "competition is bad" again]

See above, or the other replies.

are you thinking of Berlin.

Readability is an issue but using larger fonts works just fine.

This is why we need something like Berlin. It is resolution independent. If I want smaller windows so that I can fit more on my screen, I don't crank up the resoultion (and I may not be able to up the res depending on my hardware), I scale down my windows. I can run 1600x1200 and still have it look like a 1024x768 display only sharper. Or I can run 1600x1200 and make it look exatcly like it does in X (with smaller windows). I'm encouraged to run at the highest resolution my hardware can handle instead of lowering the resolution because of readability. I've lost nothing and gained a *ton* of flexibility, readability, and all around coolness.

Check out http://www.berlin-consortium.org/ Although I doubt it's useable yet.

Actually, I think most of the criticism of X is due to highly limited protocol specification - I mean you don't have alpha, only 1-bit mouse cursor and stuff that was undestandable year 1985 but not today. Sure, it has extension protocol and that's pretty much all we run nowadays if possible. This is pretty much the same thing as with OpenGL right now. You can do all the stuff with the officially supported protocol, but you really want to use all those extensions to get yourself off the ground. To say that X as a protocol is the way to go is obviously wrong. Creating a fresh protocol for network transparent windowing is the way to go - for example Berlin shows a great promise but seems to take eternity to complete. Hell, you shout out loud when we see another x86 compatible chip how we should drop backwards compability for better ISA and in the same time you don't want to drop ancient API to get better results. It's only software for Pete's sake.

(which can run on DirectFB).

Have none of the "time to replace X" posters heard of Berlin?

You should check out the Berlin project. It is a CORBA-based X replacement designed with an eye for the future.

--
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL

Y appears to be quite dead. The only X replacement I've recently seen activity of is Berlin for which Debian packages are now available.

Berlin isn't a low level interface to graphics hardware. It's a highlevel windowing system that can already use many low level graphics libraries.

-Berlin.

The guy at the webpage says that since he has been slashdoted tha attempts to delete the document (created with
What does that say about the slashdot community as netizens.

(Granted, perhaps his traffic was also increased proportionately, though that is most unlikely.)

As the main Berlin webmaster, I want to apologize for that javascript infinite-window-spawning thing that some people apparently encountered. Hemos actually linked to a page in the Berlin Wiki, and the entire point of a Wiki is that anyone can change the text of a page. (For the philosophy behind this, I'd suggest going to the WikiWeb page in our Wiki, and continuing from there. I'd rather not get into a big discussion of Wiki's in general -- ours works rather well, with occasional glaring exceptions which we try to fix...) Certainly no-one officially associated with the project put that there -- apparently someone thought it would be cute to abuse the collaborative nature of the Wiki. Sigh.

If someone can suggest a regexp or two to catch javascript to webmaster at berlin-consortium.org, I'll have the Wiki reject page edits that add javascript to a page.

Again, my apologies that some people ran into this -- the offending code is gone for the moment, and I'll be turning off javascript as soon as I can.

But for what it's worth I would not consider Berlin as any serious competition to X as long as they include hostile code in one of their pages that tries to crash a visitor's browser.

The following link attempts to crash Internet Explorer. http://www2.berlin-consortium.org/wiki/html/Berlin /BerlinVsX.htm. I think that's the point.

Infantile pranks are not the hallmark of a serious project.

that would be http://www.berlin-consortium.org/screenshots.html

Q: I can run Linux on my Dual Mac G4, so why couldn't they make Be run on it? A: Because if they based their BeOS development on the Linux porting work, they would be 'infected' by the 'viral' nature of the GPL and would have to open source their OS.

Q: BTW anyone know of a BeOS-like GUI class library that runs on Linux so we can port our programs? A: Have you checked out the Berlin? The only way to get anything like BeOS performance is to scrap X-windows. I don't know if Berlin is any faster but it seems to be the only other prevalent GUI to Linux.

Well, I can understand your desire to have simplicity and standardization, but I feel that one of the strengths of "free OS" is choice. Granted, this makes things more overwhelming for a beginner (and for an application writer), but choice enables one to find the best "fit" for their needs.

Take, for example, the ROX Desktop. It's yet another alternative to the prominent desktop environments, and one with some significant benefits. Its development is behind that of Gnome/KDE, but I feel it is still worth the "effort." Why? Because it has a differing vision from the other projects, leading to new innovations; even if ROX is discontinued at some point, fresh ideas can be taken from its development to strengthen other desktops.

Another excellent example is the Berlin Project. The Berlin Project aims to replace the X standard for graphical displays on Unix-based systems. Once again, its vision differs from X, making it wiser to spend efforts on this new project than trying to retrofit their ideas onto X.

I guess that in my mind, it's all about choice. I fell in love with FreeBSD because of its power and flexibility, but I also use OpenBSD and Linux variants when they are more fitting to the task. I love Ruby, but I still write shell and Perl scripts. I love Gnome, but I also use ROX, and now I want to try GNUstep.

Now I'll bet that you are disagreeing with some of my choices. Perhaps you use software that has similar capabilities, or is far-and-away better. But that's the great thing about choice: you can use your thing and I can use mine! If someone shows me something they think is better and I agree, I'll switch. But if I don't like it, I can keep using my thing and it doesn't really hurt either of us (with the obvious example of a project or something *requiring* use of the same technology, in which case we can *choose* what we feel to be best suited).

The problem still remains, however, that a standard doesn't exist. I feel that it is often times impractical (or even impossible) to define one, however. Everyone has their own world view, their own tastes, and their own problems, and it would be virtually impossible to take all those into account in one rigid standard, or one unwieldy piece of software. I feel that it's better to go with the Unix philosophy on this one: offer a myriad of little tools, and let the user decide which ones to use to accomplish their goals. It assumes that the user has a clue, but it's easy to provide that: man pages, books, READMEs, web sites, and gurus all exist to keep people informed.

Choice is a scary thing sometimes. Nevertheless, it has always been humankind's desire to have free will. Might as well keep that going in our software. :)

Matthew Sebastian Comella.

"They're not homeless, they're in a band...
It's the same thing!"