X On OSX Now Free

ffejbean noted that OSXTalk (hey, they run Slashcode!) has an article up noting that XFree86 and MacOS X are getting more and more friendly every day. Now you don't have to purchase a lame commercial binary, you can just install it yourself. If only those iCubes didn't cost twice what they should, this may just be a great platform yet. (BTW, I'm getting confused here, should I post this as Apple, X, or BSD? Ah well, close enough :)

Comments

What about the rest of it?

[eln]

So now that the X part of OSX is free, when are
they going to free the O and S?
Quit discriminating against the other letters of
the alphabet!

X wrapper as a 'plugin' for OSX?

[otis wildflower]

How about, instead of building a fully-fledged monolithic X system, extending the Mac interface to wrapper X functionality? What I'd really rather have is to run in my Mac interface and pop open X apps (using OSX widgets) as appropriate instead of having to throw out the OSX interface (which, let's be honest, is why you buy the damn thing in the first place).

I wonder how well the basic widgets map..

Your Working Boy,

Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[namespan]

If only those iCubes didn't cost twice what they should, this may just be a great platform yet.

What should they cost?

I hear this complaint quite a bit. It seems that one of the enshrined bits of common wisdom (or myth?) when it comes to PC buying is that Mac HW costs more for the performance you get.

Mac fans counter that it's the same or better, and give the following reasons:

1) even though PPC clock speeds are slower, programs run faster because the processor can do more per clock cycle. I've been told to expect twice the performance from a G3 than a similarly clocked PIII.

2) productivity gain by less futzing about with hardware, due to standardization...

Comments? Maybe even hard numbers? Balanced reasoning (ha!)?

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[KFury]

Most people's complaint with the cube isn't it's price/performace ration when compared to Intel boxen, but when compared to other Macs. You're paying a premium for a Cube, and what you get is a slower machine than a Mac G4 dual-processor tower, and no expandability. For this you're paying more.

This is why the Cube is the first CPU in Apple's history that hasn't bet initial sales forecasts (this gleaned from their recent earnings conference call).

I love the Cube, but I'm waiting until they come out with the low-cost version in Jan or Feb. They can't cut anything but the price, and I'm pretty sure the 'low price' cube wil be the current cube, and they'll introduce something faster for the premium price. This is what they've been doing with Powerbooks and iMacs for the last three years.

Kevin Fox

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[Doktor Memory]

even though PPC clock speeds are slower, programs run faster because the processor can do more per clock cycle.

That is true. (It's also true of sparc, alpha, MIPS and pretty much any non-x86 architecture.)

I've been told to expect twice the performance from a G3 than a similarly clocked PIII.

That is unadorned horseshit. But don't take my word for it: go to www.spec.org and check out the numbers yourself. 20-30% is more the average gain, and that's cold comfort when you can buy 1.2GHz Athlon chips for less than $500 a pop.

The "twice as fast as Wintel" claim is based on a small number of Adobe Photoshop operation benchmarks; usually filters that have been painstakingly optimized for the G4's "Altivec" vector processing unit. This isn't necessarily "cheating", since Photoshop is still one of the primary reasons to buy a mac, but if you are not a graphics professional, you are simply never ever going to see that kind of speed benefit using a Mac.

In "regular use" applications, the scenario at the moment is even worse than you might guess based on the SPEC numbers: MacOS 9 is such a turgid, inefficient piece of crap, and the device drivers for 3rd-party Mac hardware so shoddily implemented, that MacOS applications will often run significantly slower than their Windows counterparts on similar hardware: just ask anybody if they're getting the same kind of Quake III framerates out of a G4/500 with a Radeon card as they would from a PIII/800 with the same graphics card.

You just don't buy Macs for world-beating performance (Photoshop being the exception). You buy them for nice industrial design, an OS that for all of its architectural ugliness still offers a more compelling user experience than Windows, and more often than not just to maintain an existing investment in MacOS software.

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[HiyaPower]

Hmm... A Seti workset on my Mac G4 at 450 Mhz takes 6 hrs, done on my 333 Pentium 2 its 16 hrs if it is done under Windoze and 12 if it is done under BeOS (same hardware thus 33% penalty for Microsquish OS over BeOS). My 700 Mhz Athlon does one in about 8 hours (direct scale from the P2) in Windoze. My dual 450 P2 does one in 12 hrs. Somehow, it seems that clock for clock, I am getting more out of the Power PC. Further, stability is not an issue even though I am running a frankenmachengezelshaftcomputingmachin machine (a 7500 with a boatload of ram, ide disks off a 3rd party card, drop in processor, etc.) Somehow the "rice pudding" model that M$ uses to make their OS is more the problem in stability than the hardware.

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[Junks Jerzey]

>I've been told to expect twice the performance from a G3 than a similarly clocked PIII.

That is unadorned horseshit. But don't take my word for it: go to www.spec.org and check out the numbers yourself. 20-30% is more the average gain, and that's cold comfort when you can buy 1.2GHz Athlon chips for less than $500 a pop.

It was horseshit when Apple tried to say that the G3 was twice as fast as a Pentium II back in 1998. I repeat: it was bunk. But, it has turned out that a 500 MHz G4 (not G3) is remarkably fast for it's clock speed. Here's a PC-oriented benchmark site, quoted on Slashdot a few weeks back, showing that a 500 MHz G4 is only 15% slower than a 1 GHz Athlon. That's impressive, especially when you look at the huge difference in power consumption.

Re:Job's buisness strategy

[Skyshadow]

I think Jobs' real strategy is to turn the Mac into the equivalent of a designer label in clothing. The iMacs were a start, but the cubes are the *perfect* example of this. They look funky-cool. They have a well-recognized label. They cost a lot. Sound framiliar?

Jobs has had the insight to see the potential of the computer as a sort of renewed status symbol, and the new Mac cubes are chasing that with a vengence. Everyone has a computer, but not everyone has a really swanky one. Ask yourself: Does the average mid-20's to mid-30's hipster who just surfs and emails and buys designer clothes and furniture want a beige lump or a sleek, cool-looking Mac? I'd be willing to bet that you'll start seeing cK and Ralph Lauren computers with sleek looks within the next couple of years -- Apple is just at the start of this trend.

In this age where more and more of what you use a computer for is on the net anyhow, lack of software apps matter less and less. Style, on the other hand (and forgive me), never goes out of style.

----

Read the article!

[rrwood]

If you read the linked article, you'll realize that this is not really a port of XFree86 to MacOS X. This is a port of VNC, which is extremely cool, to MacOS X. For those of you who are unfamiliar with VNC, it is similar to Timbuktu or PCAnywhere in that it lets you access and control a GUI desktop on a remote machine pretty much as if you were sitting in front of the remote machine. VNC does this by implementing an X server to host the X apps on the remote machine, and then shooting the pixel data to the viewing "client" machine. Obviously key presses and mouse gestures are sent from the viewer client to the remote/host machine, too. The best part (or worst, depending on your point of view wrt security, etc.) is that the VNC session stays put even if you quit the client, so your desktop session is maintained as you move around in meatspace.

Click here to visit the VNC homepage

So, to run X apps on MacOS X using this hack requires you to run the X app on top of the VNC server, and then use the VNC viewer/client app to interact with the X app.

Sounds like it'll be pretty sluggish, to me. Still, it is kinda clever, and it does let you run an X app if you really need it now.

should I post this as Apple, X, or BSD?

[ahg]

I favor the Apple category for MacOSX related posts.

About a month ago there was a MacOSX article with the BSD demon - the discussion was so Mac centric that it didn't really seem to relate to the common underlying BSD base.

Here's the distinction I would make:

If it's about Darwin, Apple's CLI open source edition of the OS that compiles on various platforms it should be categorized as BSD.

If it is specifically about MacOSX which is tied to proprietary Apple hardware or an application running within that environment - then it is a Apple article.

As for the 'X' option, while I can see it as a contender for this article... I guess because this news is particular to one "minority" platform and less relevent to the larger X user community I would still go with Apple categorization.

Re:A big win for portability

[plsuh]

OK, I have moderator privs right now, but this thread is just too tempting to not jump into!

1) Given the architecture of X Windows, you must have a an X server running on your machine. Even local X Windows apps run by connecting to a local X server. Just compiling an Xlib will not give you much in the way of speed gains -- loopback calls under the OS X's network architecture are very cheap (heck, this is true for most OS's).

The relatively expensive part of the X Windows architecture (in terms of speed and resources) is the context switch that is necessary in this whole set-up: server process picks up mouse click and sends to client, client processes mouse click and sends display commands back to server, server processes display commands and puts them back onto the screen. Any mouse click requires at least two context switches (server to client, client to server), which are expensive under some OS's (MS WinNT/2K, Classic Mac OS). However, under the Mac OS X kernel, and indeed on most Unices, context switches are fast and cheap, so this is not much of a performance hit. (This is why Apache on Unix runs multiple processes, but is a single multi-threaded process on WinNT/2K.)

Pushing the server-side functions into the client-side Xlib would only really save the cost of the loopback overhead plus the context switches, both of which are cheap in Mac OS X (and other Unices). Only on a Windows- or Classic MacOS-based system does it make sense to try and cut out the context switches.

2) The X Windows server does in fact translate X calls into native Mac OS X calls. The implementation referenced above does it through the VNC application, which is extremely slow due to the massive number of layers involved -- one or two context switches are not so bad, but it looks to me that they're going through four or five. If you look at the Mac OS X graphics architecture, there is a lightweight graphics server underneath it all called Core Graphics Services, which is responsible for all drawing on the screen. Aqua, QuickTime, OpenGL, and QuickDraw all hook into this layer to do their actual drawing to the screen. It is possible (I don't claim it's easy, but it shouldn't be that hard) to write an X server that hooks in directly above the Core Graphics Services layer to translate X Windows calls to native, low-level CGS calls. This would make X Windows just as fast as the native libraries (aside from bottlenecks that might be inherent to X Windows) and allow for interleaved X and native windows on the screen. This is the Right Way To Do It (tm). :-)

Disclaimer: I am an Apple employee, but these views are my own and not based on anything that is Apple Confidential. I work with WebObjects as part of Apple iServices, which is a bit away from the core Mac OS X dev teams.


--Paul

Earth to Cmdr Taco....

[maggard]

The article is about cobbling together VNC to talk to X under MacOS X. This is *not* the same as firing up X on one's Mac monitor and getting a plays-well-with-other X window (which is what the "lame commercial binary" does.)

Will there be a retraction this time or will it slide?

Re:Earth to Cmdr Taco....

[latneM]

The second link in the post describes how to get XFree86 to run on MacOSX. Specifically, look here. Even the page you refer to points to that article, and even says (direct quote) "As a side bonus, if you survive the 50+ mb download, you can log in to OS X's console and run the X server directly from there, if you so choose".

How about reading the article before complaining about it?

One Downside: Mutual Exclusivity

[Christopher B. Brown]

According to the Darwin site,

This really is a document about XFree86 on Darwin, but there's just a tiny trick to get things working on MacOS X. You should follow all the directions above, but to be able to get X working on MacOS X, you need to quit the MacOS GUI. To do this, log in as console, and it should drop you to a text prompt. From there you can start XFree86 the same as from Darwin.

I'd call this a bit more than a "tiny trick;" it is more than a small matter that you need to quit the MacOS GUI.

That means that you can't, at least not with XFree86-for-Darwin, run MacOS apps concurrently with X-based applications.

It certainly represents a cool hack, but, in that it requires choosing not to use "MacOS," this rather diminishes the merits of having MacOS-X. If you haven't the GUI, how much better can "text mode" MacOS-X be than Linux or *BSD?

Re:Job's buisness strategy

[gig]

> It's really a market thing. If Apple can create a
> market for MacOS apps, then companies will port.

I'm a Mac user. Can somebody tell me: what are the apps from Windows that I am missing out on? Might as well leave out anything that already runs on Unix, since I'm running Mac OS X.

Some of the major apps I'm running now: Pro Tools, Cubase, Peak, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Director, Flash, FreeHand, Word (under duress), Internet Explorer, Acrobat, BBEdit, QuickTime Pro, VideoShop, ViaVoice, iMovie, RealPlayer, Shockwave, and about 50 smaller apps that do things like play MP3's or batch convert media files or whatever. I mean, what am I missing here?

So far the only occasion I've had to actually have to use Virtual PC for something productive (as opposed to just for geek fun) was Ray Kurzweil's Poet Assistant, which is a small app that runs full speed in Virtual PC. I was sort of interested in Sonic Foundry's ACID for a while, but Bitheadz now has a Mac app called Phrazer that's the same thing.

This is a legitimate question. I don't feel like I'm missing anything, but I'd like to know what these apps are. Never mind about games ... I'll get a console if I want those, although I have the Mac OS X version of Quake III.

Some gaps

[TheInternet]

The Mac is dying.

You do realize how ridiculous that sounds considering that 1) this has been said since 1986 2) Mac marketshare has been increasing recently?

It can't compete with Durons/Athlons/Thunderbirds, PIII, PIV, SMP

Actually, that's the funny part. Despite popular slashdot belief, G4s do quite a admirable job of competing with processors at twice their clock speed. You'll note that IBM, Sun, etc. do not freak out that they sell high-end machines with low-megahertz processors in them. The real problem is that Motorola has not shipped faster chips in about a year. As for SMP, the G4 was designed with SMP in mind, as was OSX. You can get a dual G4 for $2500.

The reason Mac lost is that they didn't realize the power of the commodity marketplace.

Or maybe consider the option that Apple isn't really about that type of product. Do we really need another generic box maker?

AMD is now doing SMP

PowerPC has been doing SMP since the 604 days. This isn't that impressive.

Motorola will be out of the PPC business withing 2 years

Hopefully.

Why do you think they are stuck at 500 Mhz?

Because their fabrication process sucks. IBM had to come in and save the day.

Right. No interest in going furuther.

They just unveiled the G4 Plus at 1GHz. No idea when this will end up in an Apple machine, though.

Motorola pulls out and Mac will croak.

Strong words for somebody who has never run a multi-billion dollar computer company before (I'm assuming :).

- Scott


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Scott Stevenson