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Making Mac OS X Work Like X Windows?

Posted by Cliff on from the wouldn't-this-be-nice dept.

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?"

1 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. In theory... by sco08y · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In theory, all IPC is done through Mach messages, whether the underlying transport is TCP/IP or shared memory.

    In theory, you can intercept messages between two ports and run them through arbitrary filters.

    Since the window server process is nothing but another port to Mach, you *should* be able to catch everything going to it, send it over the network and have it appear on another Window Server on another machine.

    In practice there would be a lot of details to take care of like configuration and non-display. But the nature of Mach is that any IPC can be generalized to take place over any kind of network connection.