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Rootless XFree On Mac OS X
Mr. McD writes: "The XonX project over at Source Forge is finally seeing some cool results. This time we finally have X windows running along side Aqua windows. See for yourself here and here. The author states that this release is not in a very usable form just yet. A post explaining how it was was done and how you too can run XonX can be found here. Finally!"
It is commerical though, but that is the way things are sometimes... However the product looks as if it's worth the money.
Projects such as this make me wonder what the future will hold for full-scale projects such as GIMP or Blender. Will they continue to be designed for X11 or will they evolve into backend framework and "plugable" GUI frontends. Say, perhaps, a Cocoa/Aqua frontend for MacOSX, an X11 frontend for Unix and GNU/Linux, and specific frontends for BeOS and Win32/Win64?
Any thoughts on this? Any projects doing this already?
Funny, what is called Quartz (the Display PDF model in MacOS X) is older than a stable X11. X wasn't used on the NeXT because it wasn't stable *yet*. Weird how we think of Quartz as being new when it's old.
I agree with you that it would be MUCH better if we all moved away from X11, taking the good with and forgetting the stuff that could be better designed. I haven't seriously looked at Berlin, nor, given that I like Aqua and Quartz a lot, am I likely to.
_Deirdre
They did port it. I dont know about system 6, but they ported System 7. Unlike most software these days, it never went out of Apple for alpha/beta testing, but it did exist.
The original 2 (semi)-public alphas of Mac OS/X (Codename Rhapsody) were released on X86. They were only missing the blue box -- the component that could load and run MacOS inside of Rhapsody. Alpha 3 sadly dropped X86, but then again it was really the first that wasn't just a slightly reworked OpenStep-with-an-apple-menu.
Silly girl, there's a reason why Berlin will never succeed.
.org domain name, a SourceForge page, and a "0.01" announcement on Freshmeat. Occasionally, one of these ideas will be taken too seriously. Web pages will be written and re-written. Mailing lists will be created. White papers will be written. Developer hierarchies will emerge. Often, one sub-groups ego will be bruised, and they will splinter off to form some equally vaporous project.
It's the same reason why other Open Source projects like the HURD, GGI, and Freedows are going nowhere fast: Too much design, not enough code.
Too often, non-programmers (or worse random C newbies) will propose some absurdly difficult endevour ("Just imagine: an Open Source version of Microsoft Office 2000! On my PalmPilot!"). Usually, this will be followed by the registration of a
But what never happens is code being written. APIs might be formalized, but that is worthless without working code. The most succesful projects (such as GNU, the Linux kernel, the BSDs, KDE, and GNOME) were founded on the "shut up and code" model. The authors spent time hacking rather than writing press releases or yet another web site revision, or the checking the latest PDF copy of the Offical Project X Standard for Widget Frobbing into a CVS mirror. And who gives us results?
Berlin is a pipe dream. A nice dream, perhaps, but so are many others.
While PDF is a descendant of DP they're different enough (really different in some ways) that I don't believe one can claim continuity.
As to Berlin - after all of these years and all of the talk they've produced nothing remotely usable. It's easy to be fully buzzword-compatable when you're vaporware, heck this posting supports anti-aliased text in a syntactically structured environment!
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
You are right on, but don't forget that the #1 design goal of the X Window System is to be "policy free" -- so not only is it based on lots of obsolete assumptions (not so bad), it never really solved most problems to begin with (worse).
In short it was a political comprimise made so that all the waring Unix and Minicomputer factions could at least agree on *something* that wouldn't get too much in the way of whatever proprietary shit they were building. And the open source Desktop Environment people have picked right up on this, building services into their DE instead of the underlying foundation where it belongs.
The long-and-short of it is that the X desktop is broken from a normal user standpoint, unless all of the apps they run are from the same vendor (er, project). Well, no shit - that was by design from the Commercial Unix forefathers. You want to use a standard clipboard between two apps. Sorry, that's policy. Printing? Policy. The same scrollbars on two different programs? Yup, Policy. How about "It works"? Wasn't that a policy that some people could agree on?
But, anyway, bitching is no good. X is what you have, and what you are going to have to live with until 2020 at least. Barring Apple open-sourcing Quartz/Aqua, that is.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Maybe it isn't worth the effort to you, but it is worth the effort to the people actually working on it. Different people have different attitudes.
One good thing about Linux on PPC: you can use an old PPC box for something useful. Mac OS X is a seriously heavyweight system. To run it you need a fast PPC chip, minimum 128 MB of RAM, and 3D acceleration. There is no chance of ever running this on any computer as old as the first iMac, or older.
Maybe for the very newest Mac computers, OS X will be better in every way than Linux. But for the marginal computers, the ones just barely fast enough to run OS X, I'll bet GNOME or KDE on Linux would be snappier and thus more fun to use.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
So it's true, OS X really is ahead of it's time.
Funny how when the PR guys say those things, they always make it sound like more than just two hours.
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Steve is going to FREAK!
:)
We're ugly-ing up his perty desktop with dirty old X apps
I can't wait to see if MacOS X will run reasonably fast on my LinuxPPC-running iMac.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
For those of you who have NO idea why this is written this way, I provide you with the following link at Arstechnica
Burn Hollywood Burn
Bill Gates arose and gazed upon the Aqua/XFree world and saw what it had to offer.
"I want this," he thought to himself, "I can make users around the world smile with delight by bringing them this."
And with that, Mr. Gates commanded his army of trained monkey programmers to create an innovative new interface secretly based on Aqua/XFree, but no one will notice, just like what they did for Windows 95.
Mr. Gates said, "All Your Innovations Are Belong To Us!"
And thus Windows XP was born.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
It's kinda funny that WindowMaker (which is affiliated with GNUstep (hence the logo at the top of the dock)) is running -- since GNUstep represents NeXT circa 1994, I suppose you can have three entirely separate generations of software running.
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