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Y Window System Project Started

Posted by michael on from the just-in-time-development dept.

cuppm writes "Y, Mark Thomas's final year project for his masters degree, is back in active development (outlined here). Here is the email I received: '...Y development is about to start up again. If you are interested in participating, the website is at: http://www.y-windows.org/. There are links to mailing lists there, and you can download the latest development snapshot, which should compile this time :o). I apologise if I did not respond to your email personally. I was on holiday in Japan when the story broke, and by the time I got back I had over 80 emails about the subject, many of them in depth. If you had specific points that you'd like to raise, I suggest re-raising them on the y-devel mailing list.' So for all those who think it's time for a X replacement, here's your shot. And for those X lovers, use Y's extensibility to make it X compatible." See our previous story for more background.

7 of 512 comments (clear)

  1. Re:good idea but wrong reason by Mr.+Darl+McBride · · Score: 5, Interesting
    It's the GPL that should be changed, not the X license, but very few people are brave enough to admit it, because they don't want to distance themselves from their open source friends.
    I'll bite. What is it specifically that you'd like to see changed in the GPL? You state that it needs a change as if that were obvious, so I'll assume you've got a specific change in mind, or a specific need that it should address?
  2. Call to Programmers by illuminatedwax · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Thank God. Finally, someone has decided to quit bitching about X Window and finally implement a system of their own.

    For any programmers out there that are even remotely interested in getting Linux On The Desktop, consider this a call. A super-awesome rock solid kernel cannot be the end-all be-all for Linux. We need to have a good windowing system, one that's faster and more reliable than the competition. From what I know, X Window could use a great amount of improvement in those areas. This is your chance to make things better, and Get It Right The First Time.

    --Stephen

    --
    Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
  3. Yet Another Amusingly-Named X Replacement by turgid · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So why is it going to succeed where these failed? :
    fresco
    YAX (Y Ain't X)
    The Y Window System
    Oh never mind. What's the point?

    --
    Stick Men
  4. Re:My, aren't we opportunistic. by David+McBride · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Howdy.

    You make some reasonable points.

    A development restart has been planned for months; the only reason it hasn't happened sooner is that we've all been settling into new jobs and simply haven't had the spare time to get this going properly until now.

    X Windows *does* have issues; I think we can all agree on that. But by the same token, we're not trying to argue that X is not useful; I'm using XFree86 on my production machine right now to good effect. But we think it can be done better.

    Linus was just one guy when he started work on Linux. Other people then joined in, and made Linux what it is today.

    Mark, myself, and the other chaps who were in the room when the Y concept was born are doing this because we enjoy it. Whether lots of people will join in on our little project remains to be seen.

    Sure, it'll be gratifying if we become popular, but that's not what we've set out to do -- write good code.

    Cheers,

    David

  5. OpenGL? by sbaker · · Score: 5, Interesting

    For Y to be remotely usable for me, it would need good support for OpenGL on nVidia and ATI graphics cards...for which (annoyingly) we only have binary drivers.

    So - my questions would be:

    1) Can Y use GLX protocols and work with existing (binary only) OpenGL drivers?

    2) There is mention that Y can use hardware accelleration on 3D hardware. My concern about this is how much of the valuable 3D resources such as texture map memory it consumes. Generally, X runs plenty fast enough without using those resources and I wouldn't want to impact my 3D capabilities in order to make the 2D windowing system run ten times faster than it really needs to run.

    Certainly X needs updating - it's old and it shows it's age.

    --
    www.sjbaker.org
  6. *Sigh* by dasunt · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Here I sit back, reading slashdot on a pentium 166MMHX, with 80M of memory, through Galeon and the X Windows System on a OpenBSD machine.

    I read the posts that say X is slow.

    X is currently using about 5% - 7.5% of my processor. It jumps up to about 15% when I change windows. MPG123 consistantly uses more CPU then X. Galeon tends to use more CPU then X as well.

    I read the posts that say X is bloated.

    X is currently using 15MB of memory/8MB resident. Galeon is using about 16MB / 27 MB resident.

    As for hard to set up, linux distros usually set up X for me. There are even several configuration utilities shipped with XFree86.

    I also tend to use the network transparency of X, which is easily accomplished through ssh -X.

    Don't know why you guys keep having problems, but may I suggest bloated OS installs and bloated WMs?

    FVWM + XFree86 works for me!

  7. More comments on X History by peter303 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I was at Stanford during the development of W/X, as a user of early version, but not a developer of X. It was a time of rapidly evolving technology, so some standards they guessed right, while others were kludges. The technology was the workstation, a computer small enough to put into the office (the size of half-height file cabinet) and enough power to run UNIX. PCs were way too underpowered to run UNIX and bit-mapped graphics. Apollo (absorbed into HP) was the UNIX king, but all its standards were proprietary. Sun was just a couple years old and its standards were half-open, half-proprietary- a practice they continue to this day. DEC (absorbed into HP) was willing to tolerate UNIX on its min-VAXes, but not write all the missing parts- especially window graphics. So they essentially delegated that to Stanford and MIT with hardware and R&D grants. So there was a lot of R&D then on how to do client-server computing and graphics.

    The primary problem at that time was the availability of a suitable object-oriented programming language. Everyone knew that was the future of software. The UNIX crowd preferred something related to C. C++ was very unstable, while ObjectiveC, based on on SmallTalk, was good but proprietary. The fledgeling company NeXT (in the Stanford industrial park, later absorbing Apple Computer) decided on ObjectiveC. The Stanford W/X group decided to use neither of these but invent a quasi OOP extension to C in the Xt Toolkit. And XWindows has suffered ever since.