Slashdot Mirror
Linux Desktop Without X11
A writes "Rocklyte systems have announced the first version of their Athene Operating System. It is a desktop and embedded operating system built on the Linux kernel, but without the "aging X11". Instead, it uses the SciTech SNAP graphics system with which it is possible to completely re-theme the desktop to look like the famous AmigaOS GUI or another famous UI. For backwards compatibility, an X11 server is also available in the system. The system can run completely off the CD, without needing to be installed on the harddrive."
Looks a lot like DOS.
"If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."
~Epictetus
Bonus points to the first one to post mirrors of the iso image.
--
Hmm... does anybody else see the connection between this and the upcoming MS "Athens" PC? *ponder ponder* Will it be the goddess that Athens relies on?
The system can run completely off the CD, without needing to be installed on the harddrive."
At least that's what the server seems to be running from.
I wish them luck. I want to have a choice, instead of being forced to use X11 for GUI on *nix :)
X11 really is ancient.
Instead, it uses the SciTech SNAP graphics system with which it is possible to completely re-theme the desktop to look like the famous AmigaOS GUI or another famous UI.
Right. Because themes are the most important thing, ever. This isn't an media player, it's a GUI.
why is linux so beholden to X? yeah, i love it's network transparent features ( i use in my class every day), but, look at what apple did with essentially a kernel and subsystem. they could port aqua to linux, since it already compiled under gcc anyways. that might be a huge commercial ticket for linux. certainly there is nothing that says you can't run a proprietary windowing system on top of the kernel, is there? app compatibility would be a huge issue, but like apple's X11, it could run rootless, and almost be unnoticable (except for the widgets).
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Athene (-n) ...but can she protect my inbox from spam?
n. Greek Mythology
The goddess of wisdom, the practical arts, and warfare, and the protectress of cities, especially Athens.
Gibble: Descriptive of an emotional state in which one's mind is scrabbling for some purchase on reality
It's ok to emulate something else if your familiar or comfortable with it, but I'd like to see an OS released that allows you to create your UI just how you want it, and not just pretty borders, colors, etc. Stuff like how it handles file structures graphically, selection of tiled, paned, or stretched work panels. Total control over ALL aspects of a GUI!
Hmm, I've been using an embedded linux with a NON X gui for at least 2 years now....
it's called picogui
Plus you dont have to buy it, and it's much smaller.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Competition in open source projects is mostly a good thing. This new GUI may make X11 developers improve to keep up. However, different projects like this also create lack of standards. This may require people to use two GUIs, with different applications running on each one. With Windows, every version retains legacy compatability for almost all applications written for a previous version. However, this becoming popular would make it required to run two GUIs to run all Linux applications. Rather than expecting developers to conform X11 emulation should be implemented.
Alternate graphics layers have been around for a long time. Some of them have significant advantages over X11.
So far the only one which has really gained prominence is the frame buffer device that most modern Linux distributions use when booting. There is even a port of QT to that, and it is sometimes used as the only graphics device in embedded platforms. It has the great advantage of being really lightweight, but it is probably even slower and much less featureful than X11.
Another one is the Y server, which was used in some PDA's until public outcry over lack of source compatibility forced the manufacturer to put in X11 instead (remember that, Slashdot?). Before that there was also svgalib. I don't think anyone cried over that going away.
The issue is support--there are tons of toolkits and applications available for X11, and the networking features are neat and useful once in a while (very often for some people, including myself). Others start with a base of pretty much nothing. That means that it is really hard for them to gain acceptance, even if they are superior from viewpoints such as being smaller, faster, and easier to program.
I personally think that we are going to be stuck with all the cruft and slowness of X11 for a very long time.
Thanks to the miracle of X10 security technology, I no longer have to worry about that. THANKS X10!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Just wondering.
Harold
and graphically.
No thanks.
Since I can't get to the site, I don't know - is it networkable?
The system can run completely off the CD, without needing to be installed on the harddrive
Isn't this one of the security options suggested in proftpd.org and a few other howto's in most distros?
Something about configuring your system exactly the way you want it then burn it to CD so even physical access to the system won't compromise it.
With Windows, every version retains legacy compatability for almost all applications written for a previous version.
When Rob Short, the vice-president of Windows Core Technology, was asked, "How many applications will transfer over from [Windows] NT4 or 2000 [to Windows Server 2003]?" he answered: "I'm not sure what the exact number is for taking an NT4 application and running it -- it's in the high 60 percent. It's not 90... Most of the time, if the application is following the [security] rules then it will run. But I must admit the rules haven't been well publicised."
Full Windows backward compatibility is a myth.
Developers: We can use your help.
X11 is an albatross most of the time. Very few make use of it, it's bloat to everyone else. It's showing its age.
I've long believed it needs to be removed from the nuts-n-bolts for something smaller and faster. Let X11 support be a strap-on application for those who need it, like it is for OSX.
Linux users like strap ons almost as much as Apple fanatics.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I'm pretty sure that this will set a milestone in the Linux development history.
... even multiple kernels where to choose from, but we are stuck with only one graphical environment.
We have multiple distributions (SUSE, RH, MDK), multiple WM (Gnome, KDE, E), multiple Office Suites (KOffice, OpenOffice, AbiWord), imaging software, network tools
I know there has been a lot of advancemente in the FB handling, but officially, if you want to have some windows you need X.
Personally, I love X, but I for one can see (and have seen a lot of) people complaining about X; and from efforts like this one only good things can happen.
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
How long before someone writes a successful virus for the runs-from-CD implementation?
Never say "never"You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
Newsflash, Amigans:
The AmigaOS GUI sucked ass and prevented people from buying a technically cool machine. Give your platform its due credit, but don't pimp the GUI as one of its strong points, because it wasn't, ever, not in any incarnation.
You seem to connect themes with simple bitmap changes, and the like. I agree that simply offering this functionality is less than important.
However, with 'true' theming, the internal function of the GUI (and OS) is loosely tied with the graphical layout and function of the GUI. What does this means? It means that a single system, properly configured, can handle many different interface styles. You could simultaneously offer transition interfaces to users from different GUI camps - Windows, MacOS, NeXT, etc.
This is an immensely important feature for this reason. While many see theming as eyecandy, properly implemented it can serve a very useful purpose; fit the GUI to the user, not the user to the GUI. It should also allow new interface styles to be prototyped - what better way to develop usability than to look at what people with the skillset to change the interface think works best?
AmigaOS , WinTel, and More Screenshots, all thanks to The Internet Archive
Like, when they use the physical access to copy the CD to the harddrive, modify it, and then tell the BIOS to boot from the harddrive ?
No nvidia or SiS chipset support yet
Would it not be possible to port KDE to QT/Embedded so that you could run KDE in the framebuffer without X11 at all? There would be a lot of work to do, but the toolkit which KDE is based on already works in the framebuffer.
Most people that dislike X don't understand it.
My favorite complaint is that it's bloated or eats too much memory. It's bogus -- X uses relatively little memory itself, but pixmaps are stored in X instead of in apps. So Linux GUI apps tend to use less memory than they would with a Windows-like environment, but X's memory usage go up.
I actually sat down and modified some code to query X how much memory is being used by each program in pixmap memory. This is memory that would have to be used under Windows. Little things -- gkrellm, a simple dock program that I have running, caches about 2.7MB of pixmaps in X all by itself. This doesn't show up as gkrellm memory usage in top, but it *is* being consumed by gkrellm.
X11 allows network transparency, 3d support, hardware scaling of video, support for more font formats than Windows does, zooming in and out. When combined with a window manager, the X11 architecture is incredibly powerful and flexible.
I wish people would stop complaining about and learn to use X's features.
May we never see th
Lighten up Francis
Just wondering..
Aqua is the most dog-slow, RAM-hungry POS in existence. I've always considered it the biggest *problem* with using OS X, since you can't use OS X without having to have this huge beast bogging down your machine.
May we never see th
Longhorn should change all of that- and I cannot wait to see Microsoft's attempt at a solution to the problem!
X11 isn't as Bad as everything thinks.
The way I see X being slow is that widgets need to be on server-side instead of client-side. Right now the client Draws everything useing X primitives, sending the raw data (pixmaps, whatnot) to the server over the network. Now if the server had the widgets on its side the client would just have to tell the server the type, size, position of the widget, Instead of sending a pixmap.
This would help things such as less bandwidth, less cpu overhead for eash client.
Maybe this could even be implimented in a X-
extentsion
Maybe I am just showing my ignorance here, But an idea is an idea.
In fact some X servers for Linux are FASTER than Windows.
Wow man. FASTER than Windows. That's the stuff dreams are made of.
-- Repeat with me: "There is no right to profits".
Yeah, this was sort of a revalation to me recently. I just got a new machine at work. Of course it came with Windows (XP Pro) installed on it so I played with it for a few days before blowing it away and putting RedHat 9 on it. I was sort of hesitant to do so because windows in XP seemed to pop up fast and the whole system seemed very responsive (not that I was doing anything heavy duty.) Another plus is that font rendering is actually better than Windows, and about equal with Macs. That's really nice.
Anyway, now that I've got RH installed (w/XFree 4.3.x) I am very happy to say that X seems just as responsive as Windows, even when I am doing something heavy duty, and I'm using KDE as well. This was the first time in about five years I've used any kind of Windows, it was a nice validation of X as far as I am concerned.
XFree, at least without propriatary drivers, might not be great for games, but it makes my development life a lot more joyful than other non-networked windowing environments would, and that includes the kludgy windows terminal services crapola.
There are several free, reasonably mature windowing environments available for linux already, many featuring hardware acceleration. Several are suitable for embedded use. Why do I want to spend $40 for this? (I'm not being rhetorical - the site isn't accessable). There are innumerable linux distributions, several of which boot straight from CD without install.
Frankly, the speed differentials Scitech quotes (over Xfree) aren't really all that impressive for most graphics adaptors. Sure, there's a big difference between unaccelerated (e.g. vesa) access and accelerated, but a 20% differential between the 2D performance of one accelerated solution and another just isn't that compelling. Now many applications are _that_ dependant on 2D performance? If I'm that 2D bound I can spend that $40 and get vastly better graphics performance by buying a better card.
The "foo is old fashioned", "foo is too complicated", "foo is SO last century" claims that some make (I dunno if these guys do, as their site is still down) aren't value propositions. Is something significantly faster? Significantly smaller? Significantly more useful features? Significantly cheaper? Those are.
Parenthetically, note that I don't apply this standard to free projects. Someone can go code a new OS just for their own pleasure, and doesn't have to pass a customer-value-proposition test. Why? Cos they don't have customers, and so they're not obligated to provide value to anyone.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
They want $99NZ (approx $42US) for each machine
running Athene in a commercial environment.
Baudtender
I've used X for many years and it still works well for me. IMO it is far better than Windows and is better than MacOS. What benefit does this new gui (or any of the others) have over using X? Themes are no big deal. If one feels like it they can theme just about anything in X. X boots from cd too. The page seems to be /.'d so I can't dig to deep.
For any opposing GUI to make ground I'd say it'll need all the features of X and a compatibility layer to let X apps run on them. At the minimum they'd need to make something like a wxWindows port for their gui.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Commensurate with Occams Razor and the law of Parsimony I suggest this method.
Help fight continental drift.
People bad-mouth X because their PC happens not to use its power. They complain about its "bloat", because they see it taking 10MB of their 256-MB machine's precious RAM, most of which is idle. They complain about it being "slow", which tells me that they have nothing better to do than play video games.
X is many times better than anything else in the marketplace; X is many years ahead of anything that Microsoft offers; it may be old, but so what? The Internet is old. Is that a reason to ditch the internet?
There is value in having alternatives. For mobile phones, the power of X is not needed and something lighter might be appropriate. But to all those who persist in bad-mouthing X, I say: look beyond what 's good enough for the PC in your bedroom right now. Find out what X is really about. It's still leading-edge and is one of the advantages Linux has over its competitors. Does it need improvement? Of course, like pretty much everything that's used. But it's the best base we've got for building on. Discarding it and going back to a Microsoft-like GUI would be a giant leap backwards.
From the faq: -jussi
A themeable windowing system!? Yikes! What will these hackers think of next?
Join Tor today!
Like when they weld your face to the CD drive so you can't open it, and weld the keyboard plug shut, and pull the hard drive and shove it up your hmm, and weld the case shut. And then rig the whole thing so that it's encased in glass, and make it neutrally bouyant in a vat of hydrochloric acid, and then you melt when you try to physically comprimise it. Kinda like Gibson's black ice, only in the real world.
Duh. The next version is X001.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
And then you realize that performance isn't quite up to snuff and you need to install some ram. So much for 0% downtime.
Just because I doubt myself does not mean I find your position compelling.
I'm so happy to hear someone finally ditched the X windows. Now maybe we can get some decent applications without needing to code the whole UI experience every time.
This may be the one.
Obviously. A marketing dweeb would see the wastefulness of defining an acronym and then never using it again. Unless. You were planning a follow up post? I can see it now:
- In response to my own post, and to reiterate, IMNAMD, I think....
This is a really useful habit of yours. I think you should break it as soon as possible.SciTech is currently in the process of certifying its existing SciTech SNAP binary drivers for use on Linux. With more than 180 existing SciTech SNAP drivers to draw from our QA team has their work cut out for them.
Prior to being added to the list below each driver is subjected to a battery of test in the SciTech SNAP test harness. To date we have completed more than 1/2 of the total list and will continue to expand this effort until all relevant chipsets are supported.
LOL!
Can anybody strip down Knoppix http://www.knoppix.de/ or Topolpgilinux http://topologi-linux.sourceforge.net/ or this new distribution to get a tiny core set of applications which would be a good end user CD-bootable Linux desktop?
Our IT people would love to have a graphical rudimentary cd bootable stripped down linux package to which a few open source applicatios could be easily added.
This is the other way round instead of Knoppix adding in as much as possible.
...for any of the Bitboys chips either... I wonder why?
Competition is always good. It drives the linux community.
The UNIX-HATERS Handbook has a chapter called The X-Windows Disaster. Near the end, there is a hilarious bit about colours. The durned lameness filter prevents me from posting it.
Search for the word "circus" in that chapter, and you'll find it.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
What's really needed in a non-X GUI (in fact, all GUIs) is support for higher level APIs so we don't have to care about the underlying GUI. That begs the question, what do developers use most often?
I'd be willing to wager that there is a large percentage of Windows software that uses the GUI's APIs directly--Win32 or one of the popular wrappers like MFC or OWL. On *NIX, GTK is probably the most popular.
There are high-level wrappers that will allow you to target Win32 and *NIX with just a recompile. wxWindows leaps to mind. However, I wager that the percentage of people using them is small, although the following is growing (doesn't AbiWord use wxWindows?).
Given that, I'd probably want to see GTK and wxWindows apps running on top of a non-X GUI before I'd use it. A Win32 subset would be sweet. No, not Wine. I don't want to swallow an elephant just to get a peanut. Full Windows emulation is overkill. I would just like to have Win32 API functions so I could recompile apps that use the APIs directly. I (and thousands of others) have written our own Win32 wrappers. For alternatives to succeed, they need to be able to pull in as much software as possible.
Oh crap... I can't even check the website to see what higher level APIs it supports. D#$% /.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"Now if the server had the widgets on its side the client would just have to tell the server the type, size, position of the widget, Instead of sending a pixmap."
Now you know why I'm working on a SVG layer for evas. As the commercials say:"thin is in".
There is no reason.
As for performance, the $40 you spend on this crap could be spent getting a better graphics card. I believe you can get a GeForce 2's now for $30-$50. That's what I use on my current Gentoo GNU/Linux system (with WindowMaker). Guess what, no performance problems -- at all [qualifications: 1GHz CPU, 256MB SDRAM, 7200rpm ATA-100 HD].
People are really stupid when it comes to buying the latest greatest whatever. Here are the specs on my current PC:
1.1GHz AMD T-Bird CPU
256MB SDRAM
60GB 7200rpm ATA-100 hard drive
64MB GeForce2 GTS
19" Monitor
Guess what? It was fast when I bought it (a year ago). And guess what? It's still fast. It has not magically been transformed into a lumbering beast. For the home user, there is really no reason at all to buy anything other than that which sits at the best performance/price ratio. You can get an excellent system today for under $1000 that will be able to do anything you want as far as productivity goes, and will play most all games just fine.
My general plan -- and I think it's a good one -- is to upgrade once something 10 times better than what I have is available at an optimal price/performance ratio. And that's only if I have some need.
It's amazing to me how many home users are tricked into believing that a 2GHz CPU is somehow going to make their internet browsing experience any better, or make programs load faster and make Word work better. For almost all typical uses of a computer, you will *never* need to ugrade. You will only need to upgrade if you want to keep up to date with the latest games or if you want to do computationally intense computational work. Even then, you can still do so at the best price to performance ratio.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
... just got back an hour or so ago from my weekly supplies run to town. One of our stops is the church thrift store, girlfriend and I enjoy that random "deal" shopping. I always head to the electronic junk and hardware, she splits to what I call the "imelda marcos" area. Anyway, myself and another customer are staring at this old xt bundle, commenting on what we are running now. The dude actually starting complaining about xp, said NO WAY would he pay that to upgrade, but he was really bogued out about what he was running, which is ME. SO, here's my chance, I ask "Hey, ever try that "linux" stuff?".
yada yada, he sounds enthused already,he's heard of it, I'm the first person he's ever met weho's used it,he asks how much it is. I sez, "well, 30-40 clams from the vendors with manuals and stuff low end, or you can.." I only got that far he goes FOURTY DOLLARS FOR AN OPERATING SYSTEM?? WHERE CAN I GET IT????
No lie. Then I drop the next one, "well, you can download and burn it for free,too, or clone companies will sell it to you for like 5-10 bux whatever, oh ya, comes with one zillion programs, too"
He's floored, gonna try it.
One person at a time
(hey spider tools, you might have an incoming)
People complain about "bloat" because of the 100 megabyte image it installs, as well as the 10 megabyte resident set. People complain about "slow" because of the significant overhead on interactive and multimedia applications.
X11 is still in the marketplace because it is standard; on technical merit it is a clear loser. As a comparison, look at the Microsoft graphics layer. It is much faster for local programs because it doesn't insist on shoving everything through sockets. It is also faster for remote display because Microsoft controls the toolkit and has higher level primitives that allow more to be drawn based on a single message.
X is powerful, sure, but face it: any Turing machine is powerful. X is an inefficient nuisance that gets in the way of doing things well. The only advantage that X provides to Linux is that it is a standard that makes porting applications easier. Discarding Linux and moving to Windows would be a giant leap forward for lots of people, but not all. For those of us who prefer Linux, a higher level graphics layer could be much faster, allow for a tighter network protocol, and promote consistency in Linux user interfaces.
Wow, until I put it that way, I never knew how hard X sucks!
This is the freely available version of Athene and DML. The Pandora Engine is also included in this archive.
o cklyte.com/downloads.html
http://www.simtel.net/pub/dl/60070.shtml
http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:http://www.r
you mean something like this...d ded/mgl_h ome.html
http://www.scitechsoft.com/products/embe
Google thumbnail screenshot cache Google thumbnail screenshot cache? Google thumbnail screenshot cache? You wanted it? You got it....
do NOT download their "Athene Operating System", it contains SCO code!!! ;)
"Themes are the UI."
Technically Themes are the "G" in GUI. The "UI" comes from the behavior part embodied in the Windowing Environment you're using.
Feel free to grab it here.
There's also a perl script in there (which I didn't write, just found somewhere else) which does more nice analysis of X memory usage.
Grab it ASAP, as the server is going down permanently within a couple of days. Matter of fact, if you want to make it available yourself for anyone interested, I'd appreciate it.
I use the XRes extension, which is relatively new...you can't be using an ancient copy of XFree86.
May we never see th
I never tried it, but maybe this is what you are looking for, morphix
Which is at least partially dictated by the theme: Is the close button upper right? Which is the minimize button?
See another poster's post about the distinction between themes (as we use the term here) and "mere" skins.
Bah, X is an established standard that works well.
So few people truely understand what makes X tick is why so many people bash it..
X is wonderful, its the crap that runs on top X that tends to suck and give X a bad name.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The AmigaOS gui sucked only in your opinion.
Many of us found it quite powerful and easy to program, unlike much of the rest at the time (and even now). And you obviously are only familiar with the Workbench 1.3 UI...the later versions plus MagicWB was miles ahead of everyone else.
Amazing how there are still people who want to jump on the Amiga's grave. Even dead it's never enough for you, is it?
(And to date, only Enlightenment provides me with the handiness of the Amiga's multiple overlapping screens.)
"See another poster's post about the distinction between themes (as we use the term here) and "mere" skins."
Even if he meant skin, his point still only works in an over-simplified sense. A lot of a user's interaction with their computer is reflex based triggered by the imagery they're seeing. Landmarks form when you have skins that people can react from.
To put it another way, how easy would it be to play Quake CTF if both sides had the same skin? You'd have to put more brain power into figuring out who's who.
"Derp de derp."
Just tried....
This is my Pentium I, at 166Mhz with 256Meg RAM. It runs OpenBSD 3.2 and took 20 seconds to start X including WindowMaker. The memory usage (according to top) was 14Meg before launching and 28Meg after everything launched.
Summary: 14Meg of RAM used, started in 20 seconds. I want to see my Windows 2000 box do that....
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
And Linux licks its behind...
Charles
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
m
testing out my trending skills
Proprietary and closed will keep this where it is. A shame really. There should be more effort to replace X.
X is nice, but is showing it's age. Problems I see:
Memory usage. It is true that application pixmap memory gets counted as X mem, not application memory, but X's primitives are, well, too primitive. The amount of memory required to represent widgets of high level toolkits in X is way too high because everything is represented by some really basic primitives, *especially* when apps draw complex things (i.e. gradients) and those things just have to be stored as pixmaps, even though they *could* be described in far less memory. Same goes for toolkit buttons that all look *similar* but not identical, even if heavily themed, they could share resources and modify them as needed for equal flexiblity consuming *much* fewer resources.
Network transparency. People always praise X for it's network transparency. This is just plain wrong, it sucks at that function. It may be better than other systems in many ways, but being the best does not mean it doesn't suck...
One thing is that it is way too bandwidth intensive. *Especially* here the X primitives are just *too* primitive for their own good. Drawing a button could be reduced to a single, small, insignificant amount of traffic, but in X, the client must describe every detail of just how to draw the button. With Xaw, they reduce the pain by using ass-ugly widgets that can be represented with relatively few X primitives. Meanwhile, modern good looking widgets make things ten times worse for the network. Even buttons with complex themes could be represented with a small amount of traffic if only the primitives were more sophisticated.
It follows that more sophisticated 'primitives' would improve the 'network transparency' for the end user in terms of look and feel as well, since the system attached to the screen can dictate how widgets look rather than the remote system running the app. In X if you run an application on two different systems, the remote themes dictate look and it detracts from the transparency and consistency aspect of things.
Also, when the connection is interrupted or the system serving the display to the program dies, the program dies with it. This is ugly. On the other hand, I don't think the MS approach of having each system have it's own screen is too hot either (RDP). What I would like to see is a hybrid of the approaches. Having the 'screen' like functionality of RDP/VNC where running where applications continue to run in the event of an interruption, but have application windows interleave with other windows rather than be kept in separate 'desktop' windows.
I can see two solutions:
A completely new project to make a somewhat X-like system with more useful primitives. The native network protocol need not be X compatible, but an application running on *top* of it could provide X compatibility. That way, the project could truly ditch all the legacy stuff and start afresh, leaving the option of the legacy stuff for those that *need* it, and not forcing it upon those who do not. The difficulty associated with the anti-aliasing of fonts a while back proves that legacy stuff is really making progress difficult. I think this is the best way to go.
As a compromise, could GTK and/or QT be implemented as X extensions, where GTK/QT widgets would be primitives rather than basic shapes and raw pixmap data? While it would not address the 'screen-like' functionality I would wish, it would serve to reduce memory usage and network traffic. It would probably still be bloated a bit much, but if people are *really* adverse to ditching X, this would make it a lot more tolerable.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Having used both NeXT and OSX machines recently, I think this "dumbed down" statement is funny considering how much more feature-rich OSX is compared to NeXT.
I guess it's true you just can't please some people.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Isn't it about time that the windowing system was directly implemented into the kernel?
It certainly could be done without breaking compatibility with current console applications. After all, linux IS a monolithic kernel. I'd go as far as reccomending that some sort of graphical interface be intergrated into the POSIX standard. Limiting unix to a 640x480 console is ridiculous. Apple's been doing this since 1984 - long before X11 was drafted or Linux was created.
X has so much potential to be great, but after 11 years, it has failed to show it. To me, that is a flawed system.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Athene
MS Pict
Omega Pict
now that is funny!
when everything is working perfectly.. BREAK SOMETHING before something else FUCKS up!
The site is heavily Slashdotted and the Google caches of it have gone wonky since I started reading it so perhaps there's something there. On the other hand, I saw information about how to be a developer using the system, and nothing about what applications had actually been developed for it. (Similarly, for PicoGUI, I saw downloads for
about 10 cool themes, and 0 applications that use it...)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The reason you get zero is because "1/2" is integer math and results in zero. If you change that to "1.0/2.0" it will work as it should.
Nathan
this seems just a like a modified litestep theme. however, besides the multiple desktops, the fundamental UI is idenical to windows: shortcuts on desktop, a start button, taskbar. in this particular case, mostly bitmaps have been changed. as someone said before, though, when theming is implemented correctly you can do a LOT more than this. plus, that is only the look of the desktop, and NOT the look and feel of the UI and all applications
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
A brief look at the picogui web pages found 10 different themes for the eye-candy set and 0, count'em, zero, applications. If I wanted that, I could run MGR
(Howto, Screenshot),
which does have actual applications (not that anybody's maintained it in years, but it's small and lightweight and at least used to be really fast back when computers were slow)
or some of the Other Obsolete Operating Systems.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Just about all of your comparisons are like comparing a brick to a rock. pointless and overstated.
NeXT also did some Display Postscript things that weren't as cool as NeWS, but still were good display environments.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Sure, drivers are a big deal, but window managers also make a big difference. Blackbox or pick-your-favorite-flavor-of TWM are a lot faster than something like Enlightenment or whatever Gnome is defaulting to these days.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Rob Pike introduced a speech on his 8.5 windowing system for Plan 9 by saying "Ken Thompson and I spent 10 years learning what things windowing systems shouldn't do and wrote one that doesn't do them." He typed 8 1/2 (in Unicode :-) into the terminal he was using and the windowing system was booted and running in about the same amount of time you'd expect it to take to get a $ prompt back. (This was running on a Gnot, which was using NextStation hardware, grayscale screen, and I think about 4MIPS worth of 680x0.) The Acme GUI on top of it was lean and mean, but really fast and while it was tuned for a programming environment, it really could run graphical-type programs as well as text with boxes around it. I forget if the size of the code was 64KB of C or 64K lines. Either way, it was much much smaller than X.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What a sexy logo they have! The girl just needs a minor nose surgery and she's done. That logo is enough for downloading the ISO (once the site stops beins slashdotted.. I hope they are allowing to download the ISO with BitTorrent).
Slashdot community, please notice: I am looking for a girlfriend.
Nave H. Weiss
And its not even like I've got a "good video card." ATI All in Wonder 16mb. Granted, I can't do OpenGL too fast, but I'm pretty sure that's a permission thing (says Direct Rendering is forbidden or something along those lines... any tips?).
Yeah, X can be a mem hog, when it is, as a previous poster stated, holding pixbufs for each and every program that even thinks of being open.
The previous sig has been removed due to
Even the XBOX can not be protected from it. The users with Physical access can do anything to breach the system. Windows 2003 would not stop even me with Physical access and the right tools. Note there are times when you need to be able to beat the secrity. Data locked way on a machine and someones gone and lost a password.
Write protected harddrives provide far better speed performance and system protection from external attack. This does not help with Physical because it still we be beaten. Open up case and move jumper on back of drive byby write protect. And with CDs the users could just replaceit with another. 5 mins downtime to image the disk take home mod bring disk back swap disk and you are in business.
This is not protection even microsoft new stuff I sure that a direct attack no rules would breach it too. Black box tools would get the xbox harddrive key. (I know have done) Alowning a pc to rewrite the full harddrive and if you forget about law microsofts own tools have it completly converted.
The Crackers will not have to follow the law. And this is being overlooked by all sides.
Looks like someone wants to use fvwm and the variety of themes with different looks and actions. Only window manager I've seen that can do windows, mac os (who would want that? *duck*) and CDE.
don't tell the RIAA! ;oP
I would like to disagree about the bloat of Xfree. yes it's huge. yes it's kinda ancient and yes it has a lot of stuff that usual user(or at least the one that can set up a linux on his own) won't use, but it is not slow. try to run x sessio without x(k,g)dm and windowmanager like fluxbox and you'll se it fly. Althrough apps are not as snappy as on windows box but it fully workable and way more fun to work than windows.
the less useful machine. I thought Bill was the leader in this area. Must we emulate everything?
The X window system is what makes a Linux machine multi-user. It also makes it useful as a multi-user machine at the same time.
The core of UNIX power comes from the multi-user philosophy. X was crafted with the same goals in mind. That is why they both have been around for such a long time.
Both of these things come at a small price; namely, a requirement for some basic literacy with regard to the system and how it works.
YOU CANNOT HAVE THE POWER WITHOUT PAYING THAT PRICE.
I did not spend the last 7 years learning these things only to have my environment dumbed down for the sake of those not willing to step up and actually learn something about the machines they say they need.
All of those folks wanting a frame-buffer only system really don't want multi-user systems --or at least don't want useful ones. Or, more likely, just flat don't know better.
As for those folks asking for X emulation, I ask this?
If the X window emulation does what X is supposed to wouldn't you have what you have with X right now plus added overhead? Why not consider using a toolkit to make the X development easier while not ruining the multi-user nature of Linux?
Win32 machines are multi-tasking machines. Sure, you can run processes as more than one user, even run applications on your machine as more than one user, but in the end, you still have only one desktop.
Many of the problems come from that one desktop and its close intergration with the rest of the OS. This is the same shit that Microsoft and Apple to a degree have been pushing all along. We don't need this.
For those that think we do, read again. WE DON'T.
Common arguments:
- The network display capability makes X slow.
Bullshit. The fastest graphics systems around have always used X. Want to see a sweet X server that does the network display thing nicely. Get any SGI IRIX machine and examine the X environment. 3D capable display, both in a window and full screen, on screen video in real time with sizeable windows, network applications, speed. All have been present for longer than the more capable win32 environments have existed. Local display requests do not go through the entire network stack. This combined with the excellence of UNIX and Linux network stacks make this a moot point anyway.
X is hard to configure.
Each year this is much less so. Soon it will also be a non issue. We have gone from hand tweaking our display to spin the CD and choose the type of display. Give it a bit more time and you will soon get all the little features you think you need as well. All without any sacrifice of the multi-user values that make Linux and X what they are; namely, better than everyone else.
Nobody needs all that extra capability.
Well, that is because most of them do not know what they are missing. We need to keep the power in the box by default; otherwise, we will end up running the same way others on more limited systems do now. Is that worth it?
X is old.
Well so is UNIX. Does that make it bad? No, if it were, it would be dead long before now.
This is long enough. If you actually want to see more take a look at my journal, there is plenty more in there for the reading.
To sum this up:
If you really don't understand what X and UNIX is about, just spare yourself and get a nice wintel PC and get it over with. Maybe split the middle and get an Apple. (I *like* Apple BTW, that's not the whole point here...)
If you want to actually take some control over your computing environment and have the ability to exercise choices, step up and shut up and start using X.
It will be worth your time in the end.
Blogging because I can...
No. Not "Yet Another GUI Wrapper". I was saying that if you are going to write an alternative GUI, the first software you port to it should be the most popular existing wrappers and APIs.
In other words, if I'm reviewing a new alternative GUI and I have a lot of apps that use libfoo as my GUI wrapper, the first thing I will want to know is "has libfoo been ported to it?".
The site you refer to claims their wrapper can be ported in "as few as 1000 lines of code". Great. Then they (or the alternative GUI author) can do that. I don't want to do that. It's not my job.
Now, I'm not knocking their product. For all I know it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, but even if that's true I'm not going to drop everything and port to their wrapper, and I'm certainly not going to drop everything and port to an alternative GUI OS. Neither is anybody else.
That's why the aspiring alternative GUI OS author has to port the most popular wrappers and APIs.
I hope that's clear now.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
That has to be the most funniest anology I have ever seen. Are you seriously trying to compare Quake to windowed GUIs? Put down the crack pipe buddy.
what does this do in windows, ive been playing around with the "operating system" running in windows and it does nothing...
For The Best Jazz/Hip-hop fusion > COlD DUCK
GNOME and KDE are responsible for slowness more than X is. But it has to be fast exactly the same way Windows and OSX are, no exceptions taken for the volkslinux....
Same with my Win98 startup disk. ;-)
Stop balling your fragile fists in anger and drop the whole put-out nerd routine. Take a deep breath, a walk, and enjoy life while you have it. Sheesh...
- X is not slow
- Some X video drivers are slow.
- The slowdown caused by Network transparency is negligible.
- KDE and GNOME are piggishly slow. I use both because I'm willing to sacrifice speed for functionality.
Facts about X usability:- Configuration is difficult, even for experienced users.
- Cut-and-paste style should be configurable.
What X needs:- A way to send less data over the wire for toolkits such as QT / GTK+.
- Easier configuration and setup.
- Pluggable cut-and-paste architecture that can be more easily used by the other toolkits.
- Better video drivers*.
* I know"That has to be the most funniest anology I have ever seen. Are you seriously trying to compare Quake to windowed GUIs? Put down the crack pipe buddy. "
No. For a comparison I'd have to use terms such as 'like' or 'as'. In this case, I was just illustrating a point. Feel free to try to understand what I was saying.
"Derp de derp."
You must be kidding. I recently switched from a Matrox card to an nvidia. The nvidia is one of the slowest 2d video cards I have ever seen.
I just want funny stuff. Wish slashdot had a setting that automatically set funny +3 and insightful -1. I'm bored. Going make another drink.
Looks like LPH has posted his own screenshots, found them in the discussion forum.
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http://www.tuxreports.com/index.php?name=PNphpB
http://www.tuxreports.com/modules.php?set_album
Now that I have it fixed the way I want, they'll have to pry it from my cold dead hands, etc.
So, instead of an aging client/server, network-transparent window system, you can now be transported all the way back to 1960's technology: direct frame buffer access. If that isn't progress, I don't know what is.
Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix.
Think of Wine as a Windows compatibility layer. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely alternative implementation consisting of 100% Microsoft-free code, but it can optionally use native system DLLs if they are available. Wine provides both a development toolkit (Winelib) for porting Windows sources to Unix and a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows binaries to run on x86-based Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris.
www.winehq.com
archive.org got the HTML, but the screenshots themselves (e.g. wintel800x600.gif) are still on rocklyte.com
Don't you mean they use up so many resources, they require "recent hardware"[1]? Even with recent hardware, they don't run very well. This is what the parent poster was complaining about, except for some strange reason, he blames it on X. ??? On a 8MB computer, X may be a problem, but it is clearly not on his 256MB computer.
(Emphasis mine.) Ha, that's funny. Reread my post. I have you beat with my 100Mhz 486 with 16MB of RAM. I'd rather use the extra reasources of my current computer for more important reasons than wasting it on buzzword libraries and making the GUI look more pretty--some other person's definition of pretty.
I don't care about buzzwords, and for the most part, I like the way my system looks now. The only problem is the blinding paperwhite colors, and the -rv switch or color settings will fix most programs, and they don't need extra megabytes to do this.
[1] "Recent hardware" meaning the latest, most expensive bleeding edge machine. Some people don't want to pay $2000(US) for a computer every year, nor should they. If Bill Gates and people like you didn't exist, I could probably buy a new computer for $100-200, and the $2000 ones would be used for rendering farms, video games in ultra high quality mode, finding the cure to SARS, or some other more useful venture.
are not all the same person. You see, we are different people with different opinions. Is this a difficult concept to grasp? A surprisingly common reaction when dude A from camp X expresses an idea different from that of dude B from camp Y, is that this is somehow a sign of stupid slashdotters contradicting themselves.
"What?! Now you like BSD? But I saw a poster say that BSD is crap! Heh... stupid slashdotters, can't make up their minds on anything"
Different people dislike different parts of MS and their strategies. Personally I just bash them so the chicks will think I'm cool.
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
Linux is still just a hobby for me
But still you *need* to have an opinion right? But of course, you spent time reading a kernel thread, that must be worth some points...
Washington bullets will simply be known as the "Bulle
I know it may not be fair to demand the same quality from a open source application but at least let's acknowledge there are still plenty of rooms for improvements. For crying out loud, don't dig your heads into the ground each time someone complain about X11.....
Reality is what we taste, smell, see, hear and touch yet we cannot comprehend it...only approximate it.
Everyone seems to complain about XWindows, what is wrong with it? Noone says, I dont see anything that is bad with it.. Its network transparent, its fast enough, it has alot of extensions.. It has few bugs, it works great.. Why are everyone so eger to replace it?
it was slow for a while, but seems to be working well now....
With our application server, I chose to install Blackbox to not only provide greater performance with the network transparecny component of X11, but to also "control" what applications the users have access to.
Blackbox has one of the easiest methods of controlling the menu then any of the other Window Managers that I have played with.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
From an article I wrote on MS Versus: .NET and the new Avalon GUI API.
Microsoft plans to release the next major upgrade to Windows in 2005. An anonymous source from a third-party vendor has informed journalists that Longhorn will not be backwards compatible... completely dropping compatibility with current software and requiring all software to migrate to
The graphics system has changed at least slightly with each version of Windows, causing problems for front-end developers such as myself. Even if these changes are small, soon there will be zero backwards compatibility.
Developers: We can use your help.
Isn't the entire point of an OS to interface the hardware (computer, other computers) to the user?
Without X there is no real purpose for the network. No, the main purpose of the network is not to browse the web and chat the rooms.
That's what people do not understand: X makes computers usable. No X means back to the stone (Windows) age.
yes, I want this too, to teach me the command line. what would work for me, would be when I start a graphical program, the console mirrors what's happening exactly, command by command by printout. right now, no idea, I still mostly click and do. I have learned a smidgen of command line, but find it frustrating still. It's like I *think* I have some commands correct, but most of the time nothing happens, or error message, or I don't even know what to do with what I have. If it was synced and mirrored in real time, I could look at it, read, go OH YA, this does that and causes this and this and this.
No idea if such a program exists or not. The GUI to CLI real-time translator.
Last year I bought a Lindows machine, cause I'd like nothing more than to eliminate my family's dependence on M$. Hell most of what we do is thru an internet browser, word processor and spreadsheet. So how hard would it be to set up an Linux environment?
Well, I tossed Lindows cause the apps in their click-n-run warehouse suck, but I bought an old version of WordPerfect suite for Linux and I decided to use Gnome instead of KDE (OK, I think it LOOKS cooler).
So I downloaded the iso's for Debian and installed it. No problem, half hour later I was rocking and rolling in Linux. And, hey, BASH is pretty cool. Now on to the GUI.
So I had to download about 500MB worth of I-don't-know-what (cause apt supposedly gets what I need) and a month later I still can't get X to work right. I have tried about 10 different installs. Sometimes Linux tells me I have no X profiles (or something else, I forget what they're called) defined. Sometimes I get into X but it looks like I see only a quarter of the screen, and my mouse acts crazy.
I have like 4 linux books and none adequately tell me how to configure X. And bloated and complicated, yeah I'd use those terms to describe X. And Gnome needs X, the GTK libraries and a window manager, and blah blah blah. WTF, if you want to get Linux accepted in the mainstream, make it easy.
I hope this is what Athene will do. So you can say that I'm not smart (I am a windows and Java programmer) but I REALLY want to use Linux. I love Linux, but I hate X, and if I devote any more of my weekend time to it, my wife will be changing the locks on the door when I'm gone.
It may seem right compare the two, but they are quite different in the way they use skins. In a GUI, consistincey is a key in usability, we use other means to identify one program from another. Like the name, the controls, and even the content it's showing, is enough.
If all the programs acted the same way, looked pretty much the same, and we had to identify them quickly, or we would lose our work, then skins would have their place.
I understand what you're saying, but I still don't think your analogy is quite right.