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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."
In my experience, firing up a windowing system
:-)
tends to reduce productivity. A simple text
based console app allows you to focus w/o
disractions.
In years past, I knew of someone who used
emacs as his login shell
---eludom
Does it support AA and alpha chanell? .-)
I don't know what's more frightening, that he did or that you can.
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 -
The only thing he found wanting in emacs was a good text editor :)
You know - maybe it's not so perverted after all - if it can use framebuffer and somebody sometime will implement AA into FB... who knows...
These two projects are trying to develop "real" alternatives to X.
Fresco is dead, but Directfb already has full gnome support, X emulation, mplayer support, alpha blending, and hardware accelleration and because it uses the same technology as the penguin logo on bootup, its fast!. This is a REAL alternative to X, and I hope you give it more support.
Directfb homepage
Last time I looked at it, TWIN needed an X server or a pure Linux console - as in literally sitting in front of a machine running Linux on the keyboard. Telnetting or SSHing in wouldn't work.
Obviously, TWIN is so much faster than X because X can work over a network, and TWIN can't. How many people use network transparency anyway? Down with X!
Hint: this was a joke
Reminds me of the old Windows 1.0 days... Looked just like that, except not as advanced.
Actually it looks very little like Windows 1.0 (speaking as someone who actually used it - for work). Windows 1.0 didn't have overlapping windows, but was graphical. Twin is the opposite way around.
It is very strongly reminiscent of Quarterdeck's DESQview, screenshots circa 1988. It could run textual and graphical apps side by side - pretty revolutionary (in the PeeCee world) for the time.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
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.
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.
I move around a lot, and use SSH to log into my machine at home to continue working where I left off. The apps I use:
;-) Supports Ogg Vorbis and MP3
vi - IMO _the_ example of bad interface design, but it's fast once you know how to use it (actually, I use elvis, but I guess any vi-clone would do)
mutt - it's just fantastic. A little harder to use than pine, but a lot easier when you have many mailboxen (I have some maildirs and a couple of IMAP accounts)
w3m - ideal if you are on a slow machine. When run under X11 or on the framebuffer, it renders images, too
centericq - all major protocols, and file transfers. This is a program that would benefit from a point-and-click interface, though.
mp3blaster - Housemates flee in terror as the computer suddenly starts playing music while no operator is around
dcd - Yes, I have audio CDs, too
cdrecord - burning those ISOs so I can propagate Free software
abcde - Rip your audio cd, look up the track names (CDDB), and encode to your favorite format - with one command!
And, of course, the usual Unix commands, C compiler, yada, yada.
Cheers!
---
Qui in ventem urinat, se lavare constat.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
If you want to switch between console applications but you don't need a 'windowing' environment, you can use screen(1). What I do is this on every ssh login:
% exec screen -E '^Z^Z' -D -R
This brings up my applications exactly how I left them last time. Then C-z c starts a new screen, C-z 0 through C-z 9 switches between screens, C-z C-z sends a literal ^Z, and C-z d disconnects. I normally have pine running in terminal zero, XEmacs in terminal one, then top(1) and maybe a shell in two more terminals. This is much handier than having to start applications every time you log in, and essential over a noisy modem line where the ssh connection might suddenly cut out. If it does, just reconnect, run the above command and everything is just as you left it.
Speaking of Emacs, you can do most things inside that including making shell and terminal buffers, so in a way it provides a windowing system like Twin.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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.