picoGUI: An X Alternative?

bockman writes "While started as a PDA-oriented project, the picoGUI people seem to be implementing many ideas which I think would be good also for a desktop graphics server ( high-level client/server protocol, presentation layer in the server _but_ modular, application management also modular,...). So I wonder: what would it take (apart porting tons of applications) to make it a suitable alternative to X+[your toolkit of choice]+[your window manager of choice]?"

Comments

Re:To answer your question

[Clue4All]

I don't understand. You mentioned plenty of papers of how X is atrocious and that it should be scrapped. Perhaps you haven't come away with a reason, but doesn't the fact that said papers exist mean that there are plenty of people who have one?

Sure, and after reading them, it becomes very clear that they site problems that are either no longer true or are just plain wrong. I was unimpressed with such papers.

1) Pay a lot for a decent X server for Windows (by decent, I mean that it doesn't put all X connections inside one Window with a fixed size, but rather creates Windows each time a call is made - unlike Cywgin xfree86).
2) Download, install and configure xfree86 with cygwin (assuming they've got the 200MB free for it). By the way, I know there is a version that is supposed to work without cygwin. It doesn't work yet, at least not right out of the box, and not with any instructions they give you.

You haven't done very much research, I see. XFree86 for Cygwin is excellent (90-95 MB, actually), and it features both a windowed mode and a rootless mode, which was added a couple months ago. I replaced 40 clients at work over the past two weeks that had been running an outdated version of Reflection X on NT 4 with Win2k and Cygwin/XFree86 (the Reflection version wouldn't even function on Win2k, requiring a $350 purchase per PC for the latest verison).

Some "inside" information

[Anonymous Coward]

Dang, lost my /. password. But I am lalo, user and developer of PicoGUI for a few months.

Some information for the curious:

1. Micah (the lead developer) compiled some info at http://picogui.org/wiki/view/Main/PicoGUI and http://picogui.org/wiki/view/Main/FAQ
2. it is not X. It cannot run X apps. No way. Period.
3. it is very early in development. I use it for a few things, specially in my PDA, but it's a living-on-the-edge experience.
4. there are client libraries for C and python; there are the beginnings of a tcl library, dunno how usable, and an old perl library which needs work. There is also a waba (java) library, but I don't have any idea of its status.

And now my answer to your question, IMHO:

1. a terminal widget that runs things like mutt, emacs, lynx|links|w3m
2. a web browser; porting mozilla sounds like the obvious choice
3. and, of course, apps.

Then again, I'm not sure X has to be replaced. But you're not talking about replacing, you're talking about alternatives ;-)

Re:To answer your question

[DeadMeat (TM)]

Have you tried WeirdX? Free, GPLed, and only 210K in size. It even runs on the crippled Java VM that ships with Windows.

Re:For the SI prefix challenged

[micahjd]

The name "PicoGUI" originated as a pun against other GUIs like Photon microGUI, Nano-X, and Microwindows :)

Re:What PicoGUI is and isn't

[micahjd]

We can, and probably will, run Qt and GTK apps on top of PicoGUI through some sort of emulation layer at the framebuffer level. But that would only be an emulation layer. It would give you none of the benefits that PicoGUI is designed to provide.

It is almost certainly not worth it to try porting Gtk, Qt, or anything else at the widget level, as PicoGUI's widgets are designed differently than most GUIs' widgets.