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MacOSX and X11
kono was among the hoards of folks who noted that Tenon is gonna be releasing a tightly integrated
X11 Server for MacOS X, which should greatly increase the potential for those of us hoping have a desktop that we could conceivably share with our graphic designer MacOS fanatic girlfriends.
to suggest new color for this page.
Or like putting an old Beetle body on a VW Gulf. Oh, wait... they're doing that.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I've always thought it was pretty bad luck to mention your girlfriend in a public forum when nobody else had brought up the subject. Did you ask her whether she was cool with a) having her site slashdotted b) the no doubt vast array of charming comments about her which our friends the AC's will generate and c) your randomly revealing personal facts about her?
Without some fast footwork, I'd say that the express train to Dumped City may be nearing Holland Michigan, and someone we know may have at least a provisional booking in the first class carriage.
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we could conceivably share with our graphic designer MacOS fanatic girlfriends.
Behind every Linux Geek, is a smarter Girlfriend that uses MacOS...
See ya at Macworld NYC!!!
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Okay can you just shut up if you've never tried it? Have you never tried one of those X servers for Microsoft Windows? THEY ARE USEFUL. No one's forcing you to buy this X server, but believe me, sometime, somewhere, somebody (or more accurately, a few hundred or thousand somebodies) will want to run an X application on Mac OS X. Keep in mind that X11 is not so much a windowing system as it is just a remote display protocol. Would you be so upset if someone made a VNC server for Mac OS X? Making an X11 server is really no different.
Since it's a BSD-based system, it makes sense that someone out there would provide a way to display X apps, to give more choice to those wanting or needing to run/port them.
Anyhow, it's not going to be a cheap product if Tenon's traditional pricing scheme is followed; I'd expect $500-$600 for a single user. This isn't a consumer product.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Development on the Lisa UI started in 1979; the Macintosh was released in 1984. X was invented in 1985. Get the picture?
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
No. There is NO replacement going on. Either read the article or ... well read SOMETHING that might give you clue as to what's going on. They are *not* replacing the Mac OS X interface. They even say explicitly that X11 applications will co-operate and communicate well with native Mac OS X applications. This is *not* a replacement; it is an addition of a remote display protocol.
just kiddin', love y'all :D
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
I'd normally write this off as a troll, but I'm feeling noisy today.
The whole point of *TENON* (not Apple, a 3rd party developer) writing this X server/wm/widget set is that it allows an easy way to display X apps and even have them integrate as smoothly as possible into the OS X look-and-feel. This means rootless display where the X clients coexist with the Quartz (display PDF) desktop and windows.
A similar product was popular under NEXTSTEP (and it was actually called Co-Xist), which allowed rootless display of X clients atop the NeXT display-postscript system.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
But why did you think that'd be interesting? (not rhetorical). Do you think that might get more Mac developers behind OSS or anything? That'd be wicked, but I'm not sure if having *NIX graphics programs on mac is going to really be a big thing, is it? (again, not rhetorical)
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
As a Mac developer, Linux user, and someone who's actually used Mac OS X, I think I can give you a pretty good idea how it will work. There's already a few X11 Servers for Mac OS 8/9. The one I'm most familiar with is MacX (aren't all these X names getting confusing).
MacX will either let you have one big-ass MacOS window that contains your X-based desktop (with whatever window manager you want), or it can put each X window in its own Mac OS window, giving everything a much more Mac-like feel. I imagine Tenon will adopt a similar strategy: all the window widgets will be Aqua-fied, but the contents of the window will be the same as always, since they're controlled mainly by the application. Tenon's X server will probably also support a "big-ass window" mode, and maybe also a full-screen mode.
Just to set the record straight, Carmack hacked X to run on Mac OS X server, and the hack was promptly ported to Darwin, seeing as it lacked a GUI.
My dream system: quad G4s, three monitors.
Monitor 1: Aqua.
Monitor 2: X11
Monitor 3: CLUI
Pay attention here. The new X Desktop is pronounced "X" as in "X marks
:-)
the spot." But the X in Mac OS X is pronounced "10." Got that? Okay, X
Desktop will purportedly not only allow remote X applications to be
displayed on the Mac OS X desktop, but will also include complete set of X
tools and libraries to support local execution of X applications and X games
on OS X. Extending Mac OS X with an X Window porting environment
will enable high-resolution 3D-modeling and animation, graphical
visualization and image rendering applications to be built directly on Mac
OS X, says Holmgren.
Try reading that aloud, and getting all the X's right as appropriate
# debian/rules
The main reason that people run X is not because it is great or beautiful or a wonderful piece of engineering, because it is none of those. It is because it is the only real standard for accessing bitmapped displays under UNIX/Linux. Apple has finally been able to break away from X, and I am thankful. You can put down Aqua all you want, and it seems many people get off on this, but all those people really need is (1) a terminal window, (2) maybe a different file browser. Just because you don't like the idea of icons and pretty pictures and such is no reason to argue for ugly Tk applications and slower video performance.
Tenron claims that their product will also work as a standard X server to run _local_ binaries also. MacX, etc. have never been able to do this, because there was no UNIX underpinnings to run the apps with. Thus standalone running of X apps could (beforehand) never be done.
:)
Basically when this does is give a complete Xwindows compatability to the Mac. Tenron is in an excellet position to do this to. They have produced some apazing UNIX and UNIX ports to Macintosh. MachTen, one of their products, was essentially UNIX inside MacOS. it had everything you would expect from the UNIX environment also.. threads, protected memory usage, etc....from an overlying OS that didn't. Plus MacTen included it's own TCP stack which was used when it was active to bypass MacTCP and early OT which had some problems of it's own. I am still amazed at what it could do without having much of the nessesairy structure needed by UNIX in MacOS. It was still affected when the MacOS crashed, but there isn't much one can do about that other than yelling at Apple
- Sig
I'll try it out when I get my Mac attached to my home network -- I've always wanted something like this.
Thanks for perpetuating the notion that men and only men do all the heavy lifting in the Internet and women just pretty up the place. Thanks for making it just that much more difficult for women technologists to get through life.