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Who Needs XFree86?
An anonymous reader writes "With this review Linux and Main says it is kicking off a project to put together a Linux machine that operates entirely in the console, including applications, without the user ever having to enter anything at a command prompt. The review is of Twin, the very cool windowing environment for the console. Applications will be added over time, and readers are invited to nominate their favorite little-known console applications."
This is probably one of the coolest things I have seen in a long time. The possibilities are endless.
If you have an older box, you can make it a very serviceable desktop. My only question is, does anyone have any information on the kind of resources it requires?
Reminds me of the old Windows 1.0 days... Looked just like that, except not as advanced. This looks pretty cool/useful,if you're going to be using console. Personally, console always holds a special place in my heart. =D
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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
1. I dont need a windowsystem on a server, console (commandline) works fine.
2. If I am going to use the box as a workstation, why do I want to use something ugly that makes my eyes bleed?
I can't find a valid use for this sort of system. Can anyone?
- To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion -
Dude, portability. As Zawinski put it, writing as an SGI user;
"Of course, all of the software I write runs on Linux; that's the beauty of standards, and of cross-platform code. I don't have to run your OS, and you don't have to run mine, and we can use the same applications anyway!"
XFree86 is conservative & lazy with regard to new features; as long as it implements the X protocol, who cares?
The one of the ways for visually impaired people to use computers is via "braille screens", which in themselves struggle to render graphical displays.
This work will have the important consequence that visually impaired people will be able to do more than they currently can, the collection will make it much simpler to select the applications available. Great work which will make the world a better place.
Let's assume that you are right. But if a simple text based console can improve productivity, then what can a GUI (that means one background image and 12 Xterms) do to your productivity?
Well, the other side of the medal is that in our daily work we are usually forced to do more than one thing at the same time. And for that I really prefer to have some virtual terminals on my graphical desktop, so I can use the power of the text console and multiply that power by using it on several tasks simultaneously.
Sounds like Windows NT/XP/ to me.
Maybe it sounds like it, but it certainly doesn't look like it. To me it looks a lot better than it sounds, but it is certainly not a replacement for X. It is more intended as something between X and the command line. More user interface than a command line and less bloated than X. It looks quite a lot like Turbo Vision, which is one of the nicer textmode based interfaces. Now they just need a lot of useful applications. I don't know how much attention they will get, neither how much they deserve. Sure it looks nice, but I don't want to pull too many resources from X or the command line.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
As for now, I'll stick with xp and fluxbox. And OSX when I save the money for a mac heh. However, I'll continue to support directFB and fresco over XFree86 just so that the projects get the much deserved attention that is essential to their success. Lets hope I wont have to install XFree86 in five years time to get a decent desktop under *nix.
And btw, fresco can (/ hopefully will) coexist with DirectFB. Also, using the fb (that penguin logo on bootup) is slower than pure console - check /usr/src/linux/Documentation/fb/vesafb.txt "graphic mode is slower than text mode."
back when most people were computing on vt100s, there were a number of toolkits like that. vt100s even have built in support for text windows.
If I can't use it to look at pr0n, I ain't interested.
Personally I'm comfortable in both, but if it's a choice between arsing aroung for hours trying to set up a network, reading the nitpicky details of some config file and switches, or just using the Redhat GUI tool to do it, I know which one I would pick.
Currently, I have an old laptop that I have been using for java development no less. I don't have X installed... just vim, j2sdk, and ant. Does everything I want. I have found that I am more productive. I tend to be one of those who tinkers with settings, etc, and becomes distracted. Not the case while developing in console mode. It may not be pretty, but I am productive. Also, being that the laptop is an IBM thinkpad with one of those wretched pointing devices in the center of the keyboard, it is defintely better than trying to use any windowed environment with that horrible mouse pointer beast.
You will never "find" time for anything. You must "make" it.
Yes, it is a troll.
X is one of the primary reasons I like Linux (or any unix). I don't want a remote desktop. I want remote programs. I want to be able to ssh into any remote computer (including those I can't physically get access to) and run editors with the display pointing back to me. Not a desktop, just the editors. On a typical day I'll have programs (mainly terminals and editors, but the occasional graphics program) open from over a dozen machines, all happily cohabiting on my single desktop... This lets me work remotely - I can cut'n'paste between
If it's ugly for you (I assume you mean aesthetically challenged, here), then get a new distro; you know, the ones with the anti-aliased rendered displays, and use a decent window manager. Frankly, if you're not prepared to put some effort in yourself, you deserve what you get.
It's not slow, at least not as far as I can tell, even my old matrox card (G450) can do several hundred 800x600 (typical game res.) blits/second, a semi-decent graphics card should do much better. The DRI really helped here, and decent drivers take advantage: if you're on a crappy graphics card, or one without decent support, change.
There has been work done (by the X team and others) to check how much faster it could be made by removing the (AF_UNIX not AF_INET) socket transport when you're running local. The result: The kernel unix socket code was as fast as anything the X team could do to transfer data around. X also uses shared memory (ie: zero-copy) to "transfer" images (pixmaps) from the client to the server when running locally.
(This is actually a quote from g4dget, but I agree wholeheartedly, so I'm including it)
Overall, the idea that network transparency is some sort of special feature that one pays a high price for is nonsense: all major desktop operating systems run in protected mode, and most GUI applications run in a different context from the window system. X11 simply has been designed that way from the ground up, while Windows and Macintosh have evolved there from "direct mode" graphics. Network transparency in X11 is not so much an issue of IPC or how it does graphics--it uses IPC like all desktop windowing systems--but in having well-defined network transparent support for features like window management and configuration information. It's lack of those features in Windows and OS X that means that Windows and OS X are not network transparent.
In practice, XFree86 is a damned efficient window system that, when it has comparable drivers for the graphics cards, beats OS X handily in terms of performance and memory usage, and usually even beats Windows.
Certainly stupid it's not. The concepts behind it haven't changed for over a decase, and have yet to be surpassed. It's true that the client/server model has changed over time, with far-more-capable framebuffers than X originally had to play with, but the X-server has evolved to cope with this - witness the various "extensions" that have become standardised...
As for "big FAT slow ass", TinyX (in the XFree86 source tree) takes a whopping 860k of space or so (depends on server-side pixmaps) when running on a zaurus. Whoosh. Almost a megabyte there. Whenever you see memory sizes in Linux, they invariably include the RAM in the graphics card (which is memory mapped so it can be used with shared memory) and the pixmaps that have been requested to be stored within server ram by clients. "FAT" it's not.
The take-home message is: Don't just complain. If it bothers you that much then get off your backside and do something about it - either do it yourself or cajole others into doing it for you, maybe even hire someone, or go use Windows, whichever makes you happier. I'd get more-informed before making any decisions though.
[I'll ignore the "big pile of hacks and rustry (sic) code." part of your post, after all, it is a troll.]
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
The RSS size of my current Emacs process is 12MB, VSZ size, 15MB. This process is also my IDE, mail and news reader, file browsers, etc and occasionably, web browser. What is the size of your Office XP process? And yet, that is modded as "insightful". Idiocy is doubly amusing, if not sad.