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Making Mac OS X Work Like X Windows?
X Fiend asks: "Is it possible to configure Mac OS X's window manager to run in a client-server mode like X Windows? I'd like to use my (rather anemic) iBook as an X Terminal, with apps running on my (manly dual-processor) desktop machine, but I don't want to have to use X Windows to do it- I want to use Mac OS X's native window manager. Any ideas?"
That's completely uninformative.
Apple Remote Desktop is a VNC or Timbuktu-like program, which pushes the (compressed) bitmap of a desktop to the client machine. While it can work for the situation the questioner asked about, it
(a) is not a truely native solution, in which the API calls are transmitted rather than the bitmap of the screen, and
(b) is geared towards education, where it can be used by a teacher to show a demonstration on a set of student computers.
It also costs $300.
NeXT's Display Postscript had the ability to run remotely, like X, but those hooks were abandoned when Apple converted the display model to Quartz/Display PDF.
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You also mis-read Apple's page, too, then. The XServe is a piece of hardware, it doesn't handle this. OS X Server has remote admin abilities. What the guy is asking is whether or not he can run OS X like X-Windows -- ie.: he wants to open and run applications remotely, which is not part of OS X -- client or server.
Sorry I was aggressive in my post. But your aggression to the asker of the question rankled me. The submitter has a point.
As for my points:
(a) Yes. Apple Remote Desktop is a bitmap-pusher, like VNC or Timbuktu. It does *not* hook into Quartz in the same manner that remote X hooks into X, or that RDP hooks into Window's GDI.
(b) Read about the product. It's not a protocol for sharing apps across different computers, although it could work that way. As I (admittedly awkwardly) said, it emphasizes a scenario in which a teacher has a program running on his or her computer, and that teacher's screen is "pushed" onto a bunch of student computers, so they can watch the teacher's demo.
And I'll elevate the price issue to
(c) it costs $300.
So while the poster may appreciate your link, Apple Remote Desktop is not a direct answer to his question, any more than a link to VNC or Timbuktu would be.
There remains a real issue here of the non-remoteness of the Quartz APIs, an issue that Apple really should try to deal with. Many, many people want them to re-implement this, after it was lost from NeXT.
(By the way, if you have an old copy of OS X Server 1.2 around, you CAN do remote display on that platform, since it still used Display Postscript instead of Aqua)
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I think that Aqua is such a high overhead system that under current hardware it isn't justified to spend scare Apple engineering hours implementing this functionality. Where it would make sense though would be in the next generation of hardware.
The PPC 970 seems to be much more multi-processor friendly from what's been released so far. Creating a 8, 16, or 32 way house server in partnership with housing construction firms would make a compelling business proposition because you would have a relatively secure system with low virus potential and you could fold the $10k-$15k cost of such a system into that venerable institution, the home mortgage. Talk about a digital lifestyle, upscale developments created with such home servers as stock features would actually fit into Apple's business plan, be very profitable while expanding the Mac user base, and would provide a compelling need to be able to run multiple graphical user sessions.
It's such a compelling solution that you might even get Steve Jobs to sign a clone license for such a beastie if Apple didn't want to pursue such a system itself.
The OSX Window manager can be made to start without the finder by writing a shell script that , in one file, starts the window manger and then starts an application like the terminal. If you go into the console from the login window with ">console" and login as root, you can then start this shell script and will be blessed thereafter to be able to use MAC OSX without the rather slow finder.
Why do I write this? This simply illustrates that Apple has done quite a lot in order to hide the window manager, and a lot of other functionality, in the normal view and it is very possible that there are indeed hidden hooks in the window manager to get it to work over a network, such as the ability to create a seperate window from another machine, not just pushing bitmaps around. The technology is certainly there, with Remote Objects in Cocoa. I also don't think it has that much to do with Quartz, as quartz is simply the drawing system and the window manager is the system that actually manages all created windows. Quartz simply composits and draws them. The fact that 10.1 had the hack of enabling one to enable window buffer compression lends some support to this theory. In theory one would simply have to know whether the window manager could send and receive window objects across the network, or if window objects were confined to the local machine.