X11R6.4 And Apache On Mac OS X Beta

Adam Attarian writes: "Tenon has released public betas of two new products for Mac OS X, XTools, an X-Window Server/Desktop based on X11R6.4. They integrate it with Aqua using both Cocoa and QuickDraw, with OpenGL support planned (the screenshots are cool, very cool). Also out in public beta is iTools, an Apache Port, that looks to have all the goodies like sendmail, DNS, and SSL. Now, if only we could get an AltiVec dnet client for X..." I should have been more clear - you can order this stuff right now - but their site so slashdotted, you can't really get through.

Comments

Oh for goodness sakes

[maggard]

How hard is it to look up something before posting? I mean, it's not like all of the relevant info isn't on the web or anything...

Apple's MacOS X does not come with an X Windows server. Apple has no intention of developing or releasing such a beast. Apple instead chose to develop a PDF-based display system called "Quartz" upon which runs their UI named "Aqua".

Tenon, a respected developer of Mac software, has developed an X Server that runs on MacOS X. This is significantly different from John Carmack's port of X to Apple's open-source OS Darwin (upon which MacOS X is based.) Tenon's X Server is driving the Quartz PDF-based display and utilizes the Aqua toolkits to produce a fully MacOS X-integrated display. In short anything run under Tenon's X Server is immediately available to the rest of the MacOS environment as just another PDF (cut-'n-paste, etc.) as well as appearing as Aqua-like as possible.

Thus with Tenon's X Server one can run a generic X application and it will appear as simply another Mac OS X application obeying as many of the Aqua UI principals as possible. Indeed with many X applications trivial changes will be required to make them appear to be native Mac OS X applications (mostly menu placements, dialogue boxes, etc.)

As one can imagine, this is both good news and bad news for Apple They undoubtedly welcome this product as it gives the connectivity they so sorely need; particularly in their important scientific research market where they're already fairly popular. On the other hand there is likely a fear that developers might 'port' to MacOS X by simply running their apps in a X term session (possibly a cut-down server licensed from Tenon) and not go native.

As to Tenon's other 'ports' - are they ports? Likely yes. Getting a unix application, particularly one already native to BSD to run under Mac OS X isn't much effort, if any. Constructing a native user interface for it, while not very difficult, does take time and some (presumably) skill. Since we already talk of ports to other such brother/sister OS's the same would seem to apply here. The argument is strengthened with the added effort of creating an Aqua UI and integrating other Mac OS X conventions which Tenon has done.

-- Michael

No affiliation with any Mac developer currently, nor have I ever purchased any Tenon product. However I do look forward to running their OS X Server.

Re:Errm, why would you want X?

[tuffy]

Let me make this very clear:

X11 is a protocol

By implementing an X server on top of MacOSX's GUI, X clients can connect to it. This allows all our current X apps to work, network transparently or even from the Mac itself. That is a Very Good Thing.

And since X is a protocol, it is neither slow, buggy or holding anything back any more than HTTP is slow, buggy or holding the web back. So can we please stop with the "X is bad" rhetoric?