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There is just no other way of providing native OSX or win32 servers!

Are you implying that intercepting the DirectX or the OpenGL command stream is not a legitimate way? There are always different ways to do something, until one comes up with a better way. After that everything becomes obvious. About ditching X, I don't remember NoMachine to have ever been very active in the X development. Maybe they had come to the same conclusions long time before, but, you know, X was what was used on Linux...

even where the delta compression algorithm wasn't even theirs to begin with...

This seems a bit unfair for people that, with their open source work, sparked at least a dozen of clones. Anyway if you are talking about dxpc, the compression NX is famous for has little to do with the original dxpc differential compression and is all about caching, that was completely novel and absent in dxpc.

what makes OnLive and Shield usable is the low-latency/high-quality video achieved through hardware assisted encoding (and xpra does this too), NX does not do that AFAICT.

I don't know what the secret sauce is, but AFAICT it is quite usable here. Fortunately now that xpra, NoMachine, OnLive and NVidia have all settled on the same technology we'll see who will provide the best solution. I think a remote display system is much more than encoding the display, so there is probably space for everybody. I just don't think one should badmouth other software to push the solution one likes more.

So, why don't they make 1:1 monitors?

Once upon a time (ca. 1989-1990), they did. NCD (Network Computing Devices) made a series of X Terminals based on both the 68000 and some of the early MIPS CPUs. One model (the NCD16) featured a 16" square monochrome CRT, at 1024x1024 resolution, and a 1:1 aspect ratio. The Computer History Museum also has an NCD16 in its collection.

So, why don't they make 1:1 monitors?

Once upon a time (ca. 1989-1990), they did. NCD (Network Computing Devices) made a series of X Terminals based on both the 68000 and some of the early MIPS CPUs. One model (the NCD16) featured a 16" square monochrome CRT, at 1024x1024 resolution, and a 1:1 aspect ratio. The Computer History Museum also has an NCD16 in its collection.

I can't seem to google it up right now, but James Gosling wrote a very interesting article in 2002 about what is wrong with X11 and how he would have designed it from scratch if he could.

Is this the one?

Perhaps X should be replaced, not improved.

Anyone else bothered by the incorrect use of "hack" here?

There's the problem. They should have operated it in an off-again, on-again fashion. Then when it finally got stuck it would be on.

But was it a rectangular thing daubed with Rastafarian symbols?

It's not just software they are changing, they got into a regular Tux frenzy and have even ordered new tux uniforms (with obligatory berets, of course) for their plainclothes female officers, they also have new firearms and even a new ASCII based special forces mascot. I would say that they've taken this a bit too far, but I'm afraid that some of them are Slashdot regulars and I'd like to not have my house raided by men with heavy duty weaponry wearing silly penguin suits.

I use it all the time for testing my PalmOS project: the PalmOS emulator has a "Gremlins" mode that throws random events at your application constantly. My basic rule is that if it survives 300,000 events without crashing, there should be no major problems.

I know this didn't make it to the front page, but is there really this little interest in embedded Linux, or non-X11 GUI systems?

I for one can't say I've ever really been too excited about MicroWindows or this PIXIL system built on top of it. We've not seen any PDAs that use it, although the Royal Linux PDA was supposed to use PIXIL/MW, it never saw the light of day.

X11 is entrenched. There have been a number of free alternatives for a long time:PicoGUI, MicroWindows (w/ NanoX [X11 API emulation] or PIXIL apps), Qt/Embedded, DirectFB w/ GTK+, Squeak (and on top of it, Dynapad), W Window System, Berlin/Fresco Window System, MGR and others. Many of these have been around for 10 years or more.

Yet, what does almost everyone use on Linux or Unix? X. Relative to the X11 install base, there is a miniscule minority of folks using Qt/Embedded + Qtopia on their PDAs, but even so it still a crappy solution when you consider how poorly Qt/E is suited to PDAs.

About as many Zaurus users are using Squeak as a windowing system. Perhaps more using Squeak, not sure. They may not use it as a X11 replacement, but they're using it all the same.

PicoGUI is the bomb. Although, it sounds like it may be going dormant for a while. One of the most promising of non-X11 windowing systems out there, but still no one uses it.

When will we have a project like this that really goes somewhere? Anyone have any bets?

X is small and fast(at least XFree86 is). When you look at how much virtual memory it has mapped in. (using 'ps' for example). You also are seeing the amount of memory mapped in for the video frame buffer. Have a 32Mb video card? Well at *least* 32Mb of your virtual address space isn't mapping into system ram, it's mapped into video ram.

Also, with any application, the code space doesn't take system RAM in the same sense as data space does. Normally you map in pages of memory that point straight to the I/O device the executable exists on. (this is called mmap). You only have a few pages of system memory actually in-use, for the areas of the program that are currently executing or have executed recently. It's pretty easy to draw an analogy to this and swap memory, except this is a lot simpler to implement in a kernel.

I've build mini systems where XFree86 and Linux and a handful of fun apps ran in 4Mb of RAM. For a diskless system, you would want to use something like XIP (eXecute-In-Place). that way you don't have to go crazy loading in applications into system RAM or have funny mmap things that try to cache memory. (if it's all in RAM disk why are you caching RAM with more RAM? :)

Also check out the AgendaVR3 pda. I own one of these gizmos. The company is basically out of business, but their PDAs definently ran XFree86 and a ton of apps with only 8Mb of flash and 8Mb of RAM.

Of course. If XFree86 is still too big for you, there is always The MGR Window System. This fun program is designed to basically allow you to run multiple shells on the same screen in a graphical way, with each one having it's own font size if you want. It looks like monochrome X11, but it's a lot smaller. It also works over both telnet and ssh quite transparently. (all the GUI stuff is encoded in vt100-like escape codes). You can even do real graphics with it, look at this big screen shot if you don't believe me. Also it's open source, which is good because it probably hasn't used on linux after kernel version 1.2, have fun tinking with it. :)

X is small and fast(at least XFree86 is). When you look at how much virtual memory it has mapped in. (using 'ps' for example). You also are seeing the amount of memory mapped in for the video frame buffer. Have a 32Mb video card? Well at *least* 32Mb of your virtual address space isn't mapping into system ram, it's mapped into video ram.

Also, with any application, the code space doesn't take system RAM in the same sense as data space does. Normally you map in pages of memory that point straight to the I/O device the executable exists on. (this is called mmap). You only have a few pages of system memory actually in-use, for the areas of the program that are currently executing or have executed recently. It's pretty easy to draw an analogy to this and swap memory, except this is a lot simpler to implement in a kernel.

I've build mini systems where XFree86 and Linux and a handful of fun apps ran in 4Mb of RAM. For a diskless system, you would want to use something like XIP (eXecute-In-Place). that way you don't have to go crazy loading in applications into system RAM or have funny mmap things that try to cache memory. (if it's all in RAM disk why are you caching RAM with more RAM? :)

Also check out the AgendaVR3 pda. I own one of these gizmos. The company is basically out of business, but their PDAs definently ran XFree86 and a ton of apps with only 8Mb of flash and 8Mb of RAM.

Of course. If XFree86 is still too big for you, there is always The MGR Window System. This fun program is designed to basically allow you to run multiple shells on the same screen in a graphical way, with each one having it's own font size if you want. It looks like monochrome X11, but it's a lot smaller. It also works over both telnet and ssh quite transparently. (all the GUI stuff is encoded in vt100-like escape codes). You can even do real graphics with it, look at this big screen shot if you don't believe me. Also it's open source, which is good because it probably hasn't used on linux after kernel version 1.2, have fun tinking with it. :)

A brief look at the picogui web pages found 10 different themes for the eye-candy set and 0, count'em, zero, applications. If I wanted that, I could run MGR
(Howto, Screenshot),
which does have actual applications (not that anybody's maintained it in years, but it's small and lightweight and at least used to be really fast back when computers were slow)
or some of the Other Obsolete Operating Systems.

A brief look at the picogui web pages found 10 different themes for the eye-candy set and 0, count'em, zero, applications. If I wanted that, I could run MGR
(Howto, Screenshot),
which does have actual applications (not that anybody's maintained it in years, but it's small and lightweight and at least used to be really fast back when computers were slow)
or some of the Other Obsolete Operating Systems.