X.org and XFree86 Reform

albepetr writes "NewsForge is reporting about a press conference held today at LinuxWorld 2004 in New York, where some members of the X Consortium, XFree86, and freedesktop.org announced that X.org and XFree86 have merged. They claim that the reformed group will be working together to bring "not just more eye candy but new functionality" to the X Window Manager for Linux and Unix." Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN. Update: 01/23 18:06 GMT by M : XFree86.org denies the story. I think a more accurate description of the event might be something like, "XFree86 core developers leave XFree86, join X.org, remaining people of XFree86 are peeved".

Comments

Get the name right!

[dabadab]

It's called "X Window System" and not "X Window Manager".
It is so mostly because it is not a window manager.

"the X Window Manager for Linux and Unix"

[nickos]

From the article

"...the reformed group is working together to bring "not just more eye candy but new functionality" to the X Window Manager for Linux and Unix."

Umm, they mean X Server don't they, or is there suppossed to be some sort of official window manager now? That would be very bad news in my opinion - Linux benefits greatly from the diversity of GUIs that exist for it.

Re:Window Manager??

[peope]

I think the parent wanted to point out that the window-managers are not part of the X-server.

The window-managers are apps running on the X-server.

Although. I cannot read anybodys minds =)

Re:X again

[echion]

X is not big & slow -- this is a common misconception. X can run acceptably on iPAQs, Zauruses, and other very memory- & CPU-limited devices.

This tiny version of X is called "KDrive" and it ships with XFree86. Read more about it here and here.

And stop talking about "choice" when you don't even know what choices X offers.

Re:Hopefully...

[IamTheRealMike]

I can't tell you how infuriating it is when you go to copy a page of text from, say, openoffice.org, and paste it into a webform in Mozilla - only to find that perhaps the first half a paragraph out of 6 made it over.

This has nothing to do with X and has everything to do with a long standing bug in Mozilla, which fails to use the X clipboard correctly. Mozilla on X has always been secondary to Mozilla on Windows/GDI, and unfortunately it shows here badly.

Here is the buglink: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56219, you'll need to copy/paste to stop bugzilla being Slashdotted (don't bother if you aren't interested or able to understand the technical details).

Basically Mozilla does not properly support the ICCCM protocols and as is often the way with Mozilla the bug has been blocking on one or two overworked people for a very long time.

An object lesson in why inventing your own toolkit is a silly idea, IMHO....

Re:Where's Keith?

[Karn]

The answer to his question is here


1.11) What is Keith Packards involvement with Xouvert?

Keith Packard is a champion of the move to open XFree86, and supports Xouvert's efforts in that regard. Keith's project is freedesktop.org, and he's expressed interest in bundling with Xouvert's results.


So Keith is right there in the middle of it all.

And according to the Xouvert FAQ, it is not a fork, but more of a public development branch.

Re:Clippy the deamon

[CommandNotFound]

Ok, responding to my own post, X already handles non-text items in the clipboard, which would presumably be available to all remote clients. The problem is that KDE/Gnome apparently do not use these facilities.

The link I found in a post below is here

Re:Good for everybody

[timeOday]

This is not correct. CTRL+KeyPad+ doesn't change the desktop size. It does change the screen resolution, but then your desktop is smaller or larger than the screen, so it will scroll when you go to the edge of the screen. This simplifies things because the window manager and apps don't even know about it. You also can't change color depth this way.

As somebody else mentioned, the real answer is the new XrandR extension. But he talked as if it were mature and fully integrated, which it isn't. In truth it may or may not be available depending on which video driver and window manager you're using, and it's not that widespread yet (ymmv).

you whatchamacallit

[Sunnan]

and it seems that the market has chosen it

"the market has chosen it" is and always will be a bullshit statement.

X has both, and it has always had both. They're not "incompatible". Middle click inserts the primary selection, while application can access the clipboard buffer provided by X, for years and years long before KDE and GNOME with things like meny options or keyboard shortcuts. The GUIs use C-c, C-x and C-v just like Windows. (In which language does paste begin with v?)

That you can choose to use the clipboard buffer does not mean that we lazy geeks should be hindered from using the middle-click method. Neither is in the way of the other and they never were (except that for a while one of the DEs had a wrong implementation that used the primary selection buffer for C-c/C-x. This was dealt with accordingly - as a bug).

JWZ explains it nicely.

Flames away, but I am still right.

Not really.

Re:Heretical thoughts

[Just Some Guy]

That's not heretical - it's ignorant [1]. It's been said time and time again, here and elsewhere, that the networking code in XFree86 is not a bottleneck and replacing it would not speed up the display.

Repeat: removing the networking code would not make X any faster.

So, given that including the gee-whiz features that a lot of us require in our daily usage has absolutely penalty for "average joe's grandma", why would you want to remove it? That's like saying that the average user won't use sed, so RedHat should remove it to make Linux faster.

[1] Webster: "uninstructed or uninformed". I don't know of a "nice" substitute, that is, one without the negative connotations. Don't infer malice. :-)