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X.org X11 Server Release 6.8
kormoc writes "The developers of X.org have just release the long-desired version 6.8.0. This release brings real translucency and allows one to set values on different windows. Also, nifty drop shadows as well as XDamage, an extention that limits redrawing of windows to only the areas that were damaged. The Xcomposite extention is still not stable, but it works well for some people. Why not give it a shot?"
On the bandwidth requirement fromt? Frankly, I don't u'stand why we don't have a good windowing environment atleast half as good as Citrix so far. The X-Damage stuff could be the ticket though.
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Gentoo users may have access to it first, but will they be the first to be able to run it? Teeheehee!
(Take it as a joke, gentoo fans...)
I run XFree, you insensitive clod
I hope this finds it way into Debian soon...
I think you mean http://freedesktop.org/~xorg/X11R6.8.0/doc/RELNOTE S.html
as in 6.8.0
Exercise caution when modding this message up: the author acts like a jerk when his karma is excellent.
I installed this from cvs yesterday. The new composite extension amazing, full shadows and transparency possible, yet everything renders faster than i've ever seen X, no flicker whatsoever.
In order to use the composite extension i had to add:
Section "Extensions" Option "Composite" "Enable" EndSection
and
Option "RenderAccel" "true"
to my nvidia driver section of my xorg.conf file
then install xcompmgr to turn it on since kwin doesn't utilise it yet.
Really, why?
What is it with drop shadows?
They're something that's easy to define, work well in MacOSX and Windows XP, and don't work very well in (some) current X11 servers. So obviously, you're going to get loads of graphics geeks rushing to fix it.
That said, the drop shadows in KDE on XFree86 look fine to me already.
Here for 6.8.0.
If you want to find out when it is available in portage without sync then check the portage database
----
Wouldn't it be better to wait until X.org makes a press realease about this? That way, they can prepare for the onslaught of downloads. I seem to remember a version of FreeBSD being announced too early on /. that wasn't really a release.
How about waiting until X.org announces it? Until then, it's just a directory of files on an FTP server.
Dropshadow screenshotsp ng 9 500411796a9ba106_1.jpg
http://ruinaudio.com/Xorg-xcompmgr.png
http://jserv.sayya.org/misc/matchbox-gcin.png
http://jserv.sayya.org/misc/matchbox-xcomposite4.
http://img3.exs.cx/img3/6458/screen_lynucs_175940
Translucency screenshots
http://freedesktop.org/~mallum/argb.png
http://freedesktop.org/~krh/Screenshot.png
Drop shadows aren't that pointless. You can see more depth and focus more easely on the active window this way.
Not all Eye-candy is as useless as it may seem
They look good.
That's it. No hidden meaning, no technical advantage, no uberl33th@x0r nonesense, nothing about skinning...just straightfowardly it looks good. No deeper explanation exists. Or needs to exist.
Cheers,
Ian
How much is XDAMAGE changing the original X11 protocol on wire ?. I have beed using something called WierdX, which is deployed as a JNLP in our project's webserver . Do these new extensions change something fundamental or is it just not applicable for remote X11 ?.
Hmm.. I just wish X11 would use my Video card instead of hogging CPU for those purty gradients and translucent windows.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I've five iTerms going right now (yeah, MacOS X). They're all the same colour yet I can easily see where they intersect *and* I can see the text below through the shadow. It's an efficiency thing ...
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Ah, so now the developers will start moving away from XFree86 in droves!
Don't forget that this improves much more then just adding real tranpsarencies!
X is a networking protocol not a gui!
Stuff like XDamage makes it easier to use over slower connections, for example.
The move to more and more extensions and reducing the monolythic nature of X is great. But it's slow and a evolutionary manner. But as you get more and more modular, stability will increase as will speed of developement. Each section can make changes and not worry about the impact on other parts of the X server.
Unlike the monolythic model of lumping everything into Xlibs and making it difficult to program for and adding new features while retiring obsolete ones.
Look forward to things like pure OpenGL enviroment! Now you have to have 2 drivers for every 1 video card... one for 2-d and one for 3-d.
Currently each application must deal with 3-dness independantly of each other. They must deal with the hardware independantly. Does Quake3 work over a network? No! But it can if they move everything to the X server. Each window then would automaticly be hardware accelerated, even if it was originally designed for the old way of doing things. Windows and items can be 3-d straight from the desktop.
That and dozens of other improvements are coming. This XDamage and Composite stuff is just laying the groundwork for more stuff, more progress.
This is awesome! From section 3.3 of Release Notes:
E S3.html#3
The nv driver for NVIDIA cards has been updated as follows:
* Support added to the nv driver for the GeForce FX 5700, which didn't work with XFree86 4.3.
* The driver now does a much better job of auto-detecting which connector of dual output cards the monitor is attached to, and this should reduce or eliminate the need for manual xorg.conf overrides.
* The 2D acceleration for TNT and GeForce has been completely rewritten and its performance should be substantially improved.
* TNT and GeForce cards have a new Xv PutImage adaptor which does scaled YUV bit blits.
http://freedesktop.org/~xorg/X11R6.7.0/doc/RELNOT
Anyone know when this will get released via yum repositories or is there a repository that has more current stuff for Fedora?
No, there is no double standard. You're looking at the wrong metric. Microsoft charges for their software. I've never in my life cut a check to X.Org (although I shall soon - and decide how much myself).
When a company charges for a product or service and it is defective, you try to return it, report the bug, and complain about the problem on discussion groups.
When a volunteer gives you a product for free and it is defective, you let the person know what's wrong, offer to retest it if they try to fix it, and if you have any time & talent to draw on, you offer to fix the problem and send in a patch. You NEVER, EVER complain. The worst you have the right to say is "I hope they take care of it in the next release".
Other than that, in response to your last sentence, on behalf of everyone whose ever given software away for free, STFU.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
It's part of a stable X.org release. The unstable extensions are not compiled by default, but they do bear mentioning because they are significant additions to X, and will make huge changes to the eye candy, as well as the utility (eg expose in mac os) of X
>
> > Why not give it a shot?
Aaaiiieeeee! Top-posting makes its debut on Slashdot! [head explodes, intarweb collapses]
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
That's of zero use on a 2D screen! Close one eye. Spot the difference? Nope, me neither.
Second, without drop shadows, it is really easy to see which window has focus:
Your URL screwed up. Try this. I disagree with the point that drop shadow interferes with focus. Right now, my focussed window has a *deeper* dropshadow than all the others, giving the illusion that it is actually 'closer', not to mention the outlining, title bar colouring, etc, etc
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
well, XDamage is an extension, which means, it doesn't modify the existing protocol, but adds more request/response types to said protocol, via a well defined extension protocol.
Will future versions of x.org allow me to specify an alterntive backup graphic card driver in my xorg.conf?
:)
Use "nvidia", but if that fails use "nv".
This feature would be worth a thousand dropshadow effects
"X.Org release a piece of software that "works well for some people", Slashdot readers claim "Sounds like a nice release for me"."
No. X.Org release a piece of software that includes some experimental extensions which may not work correctly for all users (hence them being experimental). Also, these extensions are switched off by default.
Yes. You perceive how far away from you the monitor is.
I think that this release, just (about) 9 months after the fork from XFree, shows what talented X developers we have, who were being stifled by the XFree politics.
I am glad to see the amount of progress that is being made, and can only imagine what time will bring now that there is a way to actually contribute code to the X codebase again.
Kudos to KP, JG et al...
Could somebody clarify it all ?
There's http://xfree.org and there's http://x.org . What's the difference between both ? And about the version numbers ? What do they stand for ? I have X11R6, v. 4.3 or something like that installed on my computer, and now they announce X version 6.8.0 ?! What does the 6 mean ? The 11 ? The 6.8.0 ? (And where the hell does the X come from ?)
Thanks in advance !
"A man alone in the forest talking to himself and no women around to hear him. Is he still wrong?"
No, he's just waiting for Gentoo to compile X11.
From the release notes:
:)
"OpenGL is now supported for printing"
Anyone care to explain this bizarre concept? Can I now connect my graphics card directly to my printer?
In the spoon, there is no Soviet Russia!
Does anyone know how many years ago Windows did Network Transparency?
Hmmm...
You know how I check my e-mail when I am on my laptop or away from home?
ssh my.desktop's.address evolution
Then it opens up on my laptop, just the same as if I was sitting in front of my computer.
You know I also have multiple X servers.
on my Debian machine:
ctrl-alt-F7 takes me to my Gnome desktop.
ctrl-alt-F8 takes me to my KDE desktop... running from my laptop.
ctrl-alt-F9 takes me to a Fluxbox running quake3 fullscreen on a server.
That's network transparency. I can run multiple X servers running from multiple machines. If I had a Redhat server to admin, I could open up the Redhat desktop on my Debian administration machine. All secure thru ssh tunnels, much better then VNC or Window's remote desktop.
No special software, no special software. Any and all Linux, Unix, or BSD machine running X windows can do this.
I can also have virtual desktops were I can move windows back and forth between them. You can get that with some add-on software in Windows, but it's nothing compared to what I can do.
Eventually I'll be able to do stuff like close out a X server session on one computer, move to another computer and re-open it. Thanks to improvements in X.org.
Stuff like XDamage is going to make this more efficient network-wise, and new tunneling technology will replace the generic tunnelling with OpenSSH with something more geared specificly towards X windows. Newer compression technics and data types will make it even faster ontop of that.
You Windows guys don't know what your missing by not using a OS that has REAL multiuser support (having sudo and actually having it MORE conveinent to be a user rather then logged in as administrator.) with powerfull network technology, in a stable and SECURE enviroment.
X Windows rocks. XFree86 and politics held it back, but now with X.org it is beginning to have the same rate of developement that the rest of Free software enjoys.
Fedora and OpenBSD have new releases every 6 months. Using stuff like apt-get and ports it's EASY and CONVIENENT to keep up to date and patched. All the software gets up to date, not just the core system like in MS.
How often do you Windows guys get to play around with new stuff? Every 6 years, now?
Yes.
You could have mutliple layouts.
That way you could switch between drivers without having to edit your xorg.conf file. That's been possible for a while.
you'd specify a default layout and a alternative layout (call it unaccl for example) and go like this:
startx
if that doesn't work then go:
startx -- -layout unaccl
there are examples on the web if you look around. I use one setup for my dual screen, but some games don't like that, so I have a second layout for just one screen.
I have a Windows XP box on my desk right now; the only drop shadows I see are under the icon text. I'd be hard-pressed to compare that to the (gorgeous) Mac OS X effect or this new X effect... - Fromage
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
X is the protocol. X11 is the 11th version of the X protocol (the first version of the X protocol I saw was X10, and that was some time ago on an already ancient machine). X11R6 means the X Window System, Version 11, Release 6 - that's the basic protocol level.
.8.0 bit at the end is X.Org's specific version numbers for their implementation of the X11R6 protocol. (Other organizations implement X11R6, such as Sun - they call their version of X11R6 OpenWindows).
The
I believe there was a prototype windowing system called W that preceeded X, but that's now ancient history (the first X Window System implementation to run was in the mid 1980s).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
To me drop shadows add a bit more depth and make it slightly easier to determine the active window by giving a perception of which window is 'on top' of the other. It seems to make it a bit more intuitive then just changing the titlebar color.
Having said that, the presence of the new ARGB visuals is known to confuse and break some programs. Worryingly, Mozilla+Flash and GTK 1.2 apps (like XMMS, VMware, etc) are amongst the things that have apparently broken.
To "unbreak" them you need to set a magic environment variable but as of yet there is no automatic blacklisting mechanism in place for userspace apps so .... you just have to be able to diagnose this breakage yourself.
Hence the fact that it's described as unstable.
ISTR that one of those things Xorg wanted to do was to separate the X client and server packaging. It's generally frowned on to install an X server on a server machine, but it would be nice to have X client software available there. The current Xorg/XFree packaging isn't friendly to splitting out the X client libs, or making the package control system recognize that so you could install X clients.
I don't see anything about separation of client and server libs and packaging. They have some other projects listed elsewhere, but nothing terribly solid about client/server separation.
Looking at the Xorg release plan (closest I could find to a roadmap) at http://wiki.freedesktop.org/XOrg/XorgReleasePlan
Anyone aware?
Another thing that would be neat to see is integration of the GLX/DRM work on the S3 Savage line of chips. According to the DRI page there's some work being done on this, though it's not ready for prime time. My laptop has a Savage, and my Mom's computer uses the Via KM133, which has an imbedded Savage. Of course this is an area where perhaps I *should* be trying to help.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
"When will we see fully improved network/remote access?"
:) )?
What's wrong with ssh (besides the occasional "oops, wrong machine" moments
"When will we see some innovation instead of eye candy?"
In case you missed the point, this is about innovation, eye candy is just a nice side-effect. For example, XDamage improves X over slower network connections.
"The hooks for modular gui plugins should be there"
You mean something like the extensions for X?
"Why not work on something to compete against microsofts new gui/api interffaces based upon 3d rendering instead of pixel rendering? why not kill 2d before the competition and work on an graphical interface that is competitive instead of intriguing."
Well, it would be time to make up your mind on eye-candy.
3D desktops so far were nothing but neat eye-candy, from a usability point of view they have added nothing (one can argue that in fact they are worse than 2D ones). But anyway, I had the impression that the people of X.org are working on something like that.
If you want something to change, help them - but first, please, get your facts right, because spewing uninformed bullshit on slashdot does not help anyone.
Real life is overrated.
I think it needs to be made clear (no pun) yet again, that all this work is not just about drop shadows (they are just one thing you can do with it) or "useless" eye-candy (sometimes beautification is critical to the user). This work is about new options in enhancing usability and improving performance. These new extentions do far more than just add shadows and transparency (no, not translucency, that is something else).
Off-screen compositing allows new effects that can add emphasis to certain user interface elements. They allow for windows with arbitrary shapes that do not appear "jagged" and "rough". Better performance means we can create more fluid effects in windowing systems. For instance, users are much more comfortable with things that slide around or fade smoothly rather than just snapping into position. It allows the eye to keep track of what's changing. Tools like Exposé are now possible. Overall, there are more possibilities for open source user interface developers to add significantly more polish to the desktop without resorting to cheap hacks (such as the static transparency found in KDE, Eterm, and Aterm).
And just to reinforce the classic uses of this: drop shadows really do add emphasis to the current focused window (I write this on an OSX box). Also, it can be really convenient to have window transparency in many cases (for example, when I have multiple Terminals open I can read a man page behind the console I'm currently typing in). Again, keep in mind that these features are not the goal but simply benefits of the new extentions.
The future of the F/OSS desktop is really looking up thanks to new technology like this. Eventually these things will be hardware accelerated (like Quartz Extreme) and then some really cool things will be possible.
So, in conclusion, don't knock or belittle the work that's going into X.org these days. In the future, most of you will appreciate them the same way you appreciate the flexibility you have now with choosing how to configure your window managers to your liking. No doubt a lot of people will take this stuff and produce a lot of crap, but we'll definitely see a lot of excellent work that will use it to improve the user experience.
Why bother.
Because some geeks like transparent terminal windows.
Simple, really.
Check out the X.org 6.8 Screenshots at LinuxReviews, showing off the new real transparency and drop shadow technology. These things may not increase your shareholder value, but it will allow you to impress people in a big way.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
When can we see a trusted computing environment?
SELinux integration with the X server (SE-X) to allow you to lock applications down tighter is being worked on in a branch of Xorg CVS. It's not done yet AFAIK. The idea here is that you can take the features of "trusted" military-strength windowing systems where it's possible to have secure windows such that you cannot screenshot them, other apps cannot send events to them and so on.
When will we see fully improved network/remote access?
This statement is meaningless but NX compression is clearly the way forward here.
When will we see some innovation instead of eye candy?
Again, totally useless statement. Nowhere do you define "innovation" or even show that it's a good thing (hint: I'll take an efficient and usable desktop over and pointlessly innovative one any day).
The hooks for modular gui plugins should be there - just as with any gui. OS/2 had the object based interface, windows has the pretty indepth theme integration and OSX has the PDF display..
Again a meaningless statement. There are actually some pretty convincing arguments out there that DPDF/DPS type systems are the wrong way to implement a graphics system, and that XRENDER type trapezoid rendering is the right way. I suggest you investigate first.
Windows XP has themes - great. You realise that Linux has pioneered the way when it comes to theming? It was the first to have a totally themable desktop (I think this is true even if you include gross hacks like WindowBlinds), still the only OS to have systematic icon theming, the only one I know of that has mouse cursor theming etc.
Why not work on something to compete against microsofts new gui/api interffaces based upon 3d rendering instead of pixel rendering?
I think you've misunderstood what Avalon is. It's not about 3D GUIs, it may include using 3D acceleration to speed up rendering on machines that support it but this doesn't affect the APIs.
Quick release cycles don't do anything for corporate adoption. Give us the "killer app" - in this case a desktop/windowing system that delivers everything we seem to bash in other systems as insecure or proprietary.
I don't know of any other open, standardised windowing system with the security features X has. If you can show me one, I'd be interested.
I found it slightly frustrating that no one has created an APT repository for any x.org release that I can find. I know I could do it, but I have neither the resources or energy to actually figure out how to make up that rather... impressive package.
--- My novel, The Mummy's Girl is now for sa
Windows alpha support is basically "Make this window sorta transparent". The Windows desktop isn't actually composited: only when a translucent window is over another window is the contents of that window buffered. The rest of the time you're still in flicker-land.
I guess back in 2001 when XP was released average machine didn't have enough RAM to make it doable. Many perhaps still don't, but nonetheless Windows is last in the composited desktop arena.
I'm not satisfied with the above answers, so I'm going to try one myself.
The X Windowing System was originally an MIT project for unix (not linux specifically, it works with linux because linux carries on with the unix specification) that was made open source and turned into open source. X is just the name of the system, the 11 is the current version of the specification. 11 has been active since 1988.
The XFree86 organization managed the X-Window-System until version v4.3. Earlier this year, though, they released v4.4 under a license that was thought incompatible with the GPL, which caused a split. Alot of politics went on and alot of people got angry, which caused the birth of the X.Org foundation, which is now industry backed and also backed now by most major distributions such as Slackware (I think they were the first?) and Mandrake, Redhat, Gentoo. Others such as Debian still use XFree86 v4.3 instead of updating to 4.4.
The first version of X.Org was version 6.7 (which carried on the MIT X versioning system), which was released on March 31 this year. Now X11R6.8 has been released, carrying along again with the numbering system.
I hope that explains it for you.
``But as you get more and more modular, stability will increase as will speed of developement.''
I keep hearing this argument. However, I am not all that convinced that modularity will improve stability. After all, things tend to break around the edges. More modules means more edges, thus more opportunities to break.
Also, modules only work by virtue of well-defined interfaces. What if some of the interfaces turn out to be suboptimal? Retaining the interface can severely burden development and innovation. Changing the interface can require massive code changes.
I am all for modularity, but I can't assume that it will lead to more stability and productivity.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Man I can't wait for the autotooled X.org releases sometime in the future (debrix or whatever the branch name is called).
Building this beast is a trip down memory lane to the bad old days. Half way trough it bombs out on me because it can't find bison (now there's a program I haven't yet needed this century). So you install the program and continue on with "make World". What follows is the longest "clean" operation I've ever seen. Forget about just picking up compiling where it left. You're better of deleting the whole tree and unpacking the sources again, trust me, you'll save time.
Imake was a piece of shit when it was new and unsuprisingly it still holds true in 2004. However if it wasn't for X.org and Freedesktop I bet we'd still be compiling XFree86 5.0 with this pos a few years from now, at least someone at X.org is working on moving to the autotools for the next release.
It's like deja vu all over again.
Actually ... for some people it is practical. After working at the computer for long hours with lots of windows open in the background, corners, sides ... every which way you can stick them ... the windows kind of run together! lol. Shadows around windows allow a window to appear on top making it easier for your eye to pick up the open window.
No, you're wrong on two fronts. First, the virus is working correctly by wrecking the machine, so my original response doesn't apply. Second, I didn't accept the virus, it was surrupticiously installed on my computer.
Stabbing me with a knife isn't the same as having a table of them and saying I can have one if I choose.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
No, the overhead of the X protocol is negligable. When doing profiling runs the bottlenecks are nearly always either in the serverhardware link or inside the toolkit. The applicationserver link doesn't really slow much down at all.
When can we see a trusted computing environment? (gui down) When will we see fully improved network/remote access?
there was in issue around ownership of tmp file fixed in this release, and integration with selinux should be not far behind.
When will we see some innovation instead of eye candy? Why does something have to be invented on OSX or Windows instead of pioneered on linux?
do you have any idea how this stuff was done? completely network transparent window rendering and compositing? windows and mac can't do that!
The hooks for modular gui plugins should be there - just as with any gui. OS/2 had the object based interface, windows has the pretty indepth theme integration and OSX has the PDF display..
and render and and composite are extensions to the X protocol (i.e. plugins). Gnome and KDE have object based UIs and indepth theme integration, and render is a Porter-Duff based compositing model that can be hooked into Cairo for a PDF like API. I'm starting to think I have just bitten into a troll here...
Why not work on something to compete against microsofts new gui/api interffaces based upon 3d rendering instead of pixel rendering? why not kill 2d before the competition and work on an graphical interface that is competitive instead of intriguing.
that was the whole point. or maybe you haven't been paying attention?
Quick release cycles don't do anything for corporate adoption. Give us the "killer app" - in this case a desktop/windowing system that delivers everything we seem to bash in other systems as insecure or proprietary.
The time based realease plans now being used by Gnome and X.org have given us some pretty cool stuff in a short period of time. I'm really not sure what you're complaining about.
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
Umm. they have had that for sometime now, its called 'seamless windows' in citrix-speak. And has been out for at least a couple of versions now.. ( we expiremented with it 5 years ago, might have been beta then.. dont remember now to be honest )
You simply "publish" a single application specify that its 'seamless', and run it as a single window.. no 'citrix desktop' required..
We do it every day now, with hundreds of clients...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
When will we see some innovation instead of eye candy? Why does something have to be invented on OSX or Windows instead of pioneered on linux?
Because for the most part, that is not, and will probably never be, the way Linux development has worked. UNIX, yes, but Linux, traditionally not.
Now, before you put gasoline underwear on me and get ready to strike a match, hear me out. For the most part, Linux has been an environment where the best ideas from surrounding computing environments have been taken, sythesized, sifted, reviewed, and eventually had the creme-de-la-creme added to the mix. It's like making chocolate chip cookies but you've reviewed every chocolate chip and grain of flour prior to inclusion.
Now, this being said, has nothing been invented on Linux, is it all a facsimile? Of course not -- lots of apps exist in Linux that are unique. However, think about how music is composed nowadays. Most music written is a combination of theory, heritage, culture, and style. There's nothing really groundbreaking about it; no one is out making music from the sound of tomatoes rotting. However, the music is still new -- it's just another rendering of the general mish-mash.
Hence is Linux and Linux development. It doesn't always have to follow a pioneering stance; indeed, it rarely has. Nor is there a need to start now. I think in a lot of ways, the community does better if it takes the best of the already-field-tested and manipulates that into a successful product. Let the others take the heat and trials of something new and potentially groundbreaking (MS Bob, anyone?) and let us reap the goods.
Blog,Twitter
Its not just that it looks nice. The technology behind it is what matters. The Composite extension for example double-buffers the windows (or something like that, I'm the person to speak about this) so moving your windows is much smoother, and you can notice that even now in this released version, where all those pieces are far from being "rock stable" or "fast". It also allows to have a miniaturized version of your desktop (one which is a _real_ miniaturized version of your desktop, with the miniature of a video player in other virtual desktop being updated, etc) much more easily. Damage can reduce greatly the amount of bandwith used in VNC-like clients, etc.
Shadows and transparencies are just one of the things which you can do with all those toys, but the fact that the pieces behing them are there is what matters, using the hardware to do all this, etc. As a plus, shadows and transparencies are nice (I'd like to have them even in the light window managers at least). I don't know why people is so concerned about "shadows are not useful". This is a win-win situation, no drawbacks.
No, the X Server is the program for displaying stuff. X11R6 just specifies a standard protocol. The protocol doesn't need to be a network one (and on your local machine, none of the X clients talk over your TCP/IP stack).
Anyone can implement an X server that adheres to the X11R6 protocol (and several UNIX vendors have; in the closed-source UNIX world Sun has their own implementation, and I bet all the others have too, although they may be based on the reference implementation - the old X Consortium X server). In the open source world, we have two implementations (which are very similar but now diverging - the XFree server and the X.Org server)
I don't know the historic reasons for why X was designed because I was only a small child in 1986 (I dare say somewhere on the Internet has the story as to why it was made in the way it was), but separating the client and the server like they have is extremely useful - the client doesn't care where the X server is or what the X server is. It means the client is well decoupled from the implementation of the X server - an X client running on HP/UX will display correctly on an X.Org X server running on Linux and you don't need to worry about DLL hell to make it all work - it just works. It's a very clean design and that's one of the reasons it's lasted so long.
As for the different implementations, X clients (i.e your programs) aren't linked to the X server or its header files. OpenWindows could be a radically different internal design with no header files in common with X.Org's server. What the clients link to is not the X server's header files - but XLib. XLib implements the client part of the deal, including the header files a C programmer would use. And XLib isn't linked to the X Server - it implements the X protocol (and that's why a Linux program written with Vendor A's xlib will work fine with Vendor B's X server running on some completely different architecture).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
"But why do we talk about a "protocol" ? Isn't X a program for displaying stuff ? I know we can use remote display on a network with X, but why isn't it only a feature ? Why is X so focused on network terminology?"
.h file to create windows, draw primitives, etc. Your program is compiled against some libraries that contain this drawing code directly. If you want to do remote displays across a network, you have to use some sort of add-on software or custom library. If you are coming from this paradigm, what you are asking is a very good question.
The fundamental design of X is different than say, MS Windows. It is always network-based. We have to talk about a network protocol because that is how every X client program communicates, even locally. It's not just an optional feature. Its the entire design.
In MS Windows, you write a program that calls functions in a
The difference is that every application that runs on X communicates over a "network". Whether you are opening Firefox on your own desktop or running an application on a remote server thousands of miles away, the application you are running connects to your X server and sends drawing commands over the "network". There is never any direct link to drawing code like there is in Windows - all commands pass over the "network". Of course if the application is local, optimizations are in place to make this communication very fast and not pass through the OS's networking stack.
This lets you do a very neat thing: Every graphical X-based program you have on your linux desktop can be run on any other X server. I'm not talking about just the few special ones that support it or link some special library. I mean every single program. Since you have to use the network even if you are running locally, to run on a remote server you just tell it to use a different IP address for the display. This is true network computing. The display is just an IP address and a port/desktop number.
Download an X server for your MS Windows desktop. Then log in to a Sun/Linux/BSD/etc box and you can run most any X application. There are a very small number of exceptions (like a program that requires an extention that your X server does not have, I.E. OpenGL for Quake3), but those are very rare.
In many ways, X is the most conceptually advanced and "network aware" desktop display system, despite being designed in the 1980s. Unfortunately, it is also painfully old in a lot of ways and painfully lacking in other, non-networking areas. The concept is really great and it works pretty well, but it would be nice to have a crack at redesigning the protocol based on other advances in computing. But failing that, I'm really glad that X.org is pushing things along and modernizing. The XFree86.org team had basically stalled out in a quagmire of politics and a need to cling to the past.
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OK, so let me see if I understand this correctly. An X "server" isn't a server in the traditional (UT2K3) sense, but rather a piece of software which controls the display. An X "client", then, is the software which tells the server what to draw. The server then figures out how to draw it. Is this close to being right? It's a bit confusing thinking that the server is the thing the user deals with directly and the client could be on a rackmount thousands of miles away, but it makes sense when you think about it for a few seconds.
Aside from advanced support for 3D accelerators, what's really missing out of X as it is now?
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So many people crap all over XFree. We should thank that group for getting us this far. X.org was not written from scratch. Thanks to open source, a new group was able to build upon their excellent work and create an even better product.
We stand on the shoulders of giants.
I wrote up a guide to setting up Xorg 6.8RC4 + X Composite with shadows and transperency the other day. These steps should also hold true for 6.8 final of course. Enjoy.
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Think of it like this: The side which is initiating the conversation is the client (just like a webbrowser). The one responding is the server (just like a webserver). When an application wants to draw something on the screen, it will initiate the conversation, so this is the client. The display is just quietly waiting for somebody to give him something to do.
But why do we talk about a "protocol" ? Isn't X a program for displaying stuff ?
Nope. X is a protocol for sending drawing requests. An X server is a program for displaying stuff.
I know we can use remote display on a network with X, but why isn't it only a feature? Why is X so focused on network terminology?
Some features are just minor tweaks to a basic design that could exclude them, other features are fundamental to the design. Network transparency is fundamental to the design of X. Even when you're not using a remote display, you're always using the X protocol, but over UNIX sockets rather than TCP sockets.
And how about differences between XFree.org and X.org ? And OpenWindows ? Are they three implementations of functions (same ".h"s) for displaying windows and drawing things?
They're all programs that receive drawing requests in X protocol messages and then do their best to fulfill the requests by drawing stuff on a display. XFree86 and X.org are mostly the same codebase as well, but that's not really relevant to their functions as X servers. There are lots of other X servers around like OpenWindows, Hummingbird EXceed, MetroLink, Xi Graphics, XVision, and bunches more. Pretty much any X client application can use any of these X servers, locally or remotely, to display windows and draw things. Some X servers have more features than others, some have better performance than others, some support more graphics cards than others, but all implement the same standard protocol so they're all to some degree interchangeable.
But you asked about differences, not similarities.
Those are some examples of X servers and how they differ from one another. There are many, many more, particularly in the commercial X server space, but they all work with all X clients, locally or remotely, and the common thread that binds them all together is the X protocol.
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You fools! Four is the number of the pixels and the number of the pixels shall be four! Not two! Not three, unless one then proceedeth to four! Five is right out!
I dunno what you mean by 'advanced' support for 3D accelerators (I'm very impressed at how well RTCW:ET runs on FC2 running the X.Org X server - it's at least twice as fast as XFree86 on RH8.0 on the same machine) but the 3D support is getting better all the time; it's just a real shame the NVidia driver isn't open source.
Talking of games - the fundamental network design of X and the display program being the X server (essentially a daemon) means my Windows-using ET playing friends are envious of how I play the game in Linux. I simply start up a second X server. That's all there is to having two entirely separate desktops on one machine. Just start another desktop. The clients (such as my game) don't even have to be aware of this functionality - they just display to unix:1 instead of unix:0, as set in the DISPLAY environment variable. I can hot key between the two desktops with Ctrl-Alt-F7 and Ctrl-Alt-F8, so I can run ET in fullscreen and easily flick back to IRC.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I have found the answer on this question here.
igor
The reason you publish today is to support their web based interface/portal, 'nfuse'...
..
This gives you the ability to launch any application from a secure web page, giving the appearance that its running on your local machine, with all the advantages of clustering of your applications on the 'big boxes' back in the server room. You also get a really low network profile, ICA/RDP is pretty network friendly. And the client is multiplatform
Before Nfuse, the admin would stick items in your start-menu for you.... you click on "word", and poof, word appears.. The user never knows the difference.. ( this can still be done, but they are pushing the 'portal product' like everyone else these days..
You can still publish a complete desktop for Winterm type users..
And yes, to answer your question, dialogs and pop ups are in separate windows.. this is NOT some 'desktop hack'..
You can also have stateless or statefull connections.. Something raw X is not too great about, you loose your connection, your app/desktop closes..
You might try to get a chance to take a look at their products, you might be pleasantly surprised.. they are however, really damned expensive... I only have worked with the windows based products, since 'winframe', but I guess they also have the same sort of product based on Solaris too..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The XFree86 website doesn't really reflect these issues either; if they are still working, nobody cares.
There is still activity on the mailing list
"I have a Windows XP box on my desk right now; the only drop shadows I see are under the icon text."
Try opening up a menu sometime. While I agree that the XP shadows aren't as pretty, there are 3rd party applications that can create the "pretty" drop shadows. The layered window support in Windows since Windows 2000 allows per-pixel alpha to be specified for windows. With the proper graphics drivers, it's even hardware accelerated.
So, Bob took a copy of a Unix port of the "W" window system (written for the V kernel) that Chris Kent had done with Paul Asente at Stanford, changed it from be synchronous to asynchronous, and dubbed it "X" (from then on, we teased him that we'd never let him name anything again :-).
The early version of the X protocol (up through X10) were focused on fixing various things that came up as the system was ported to different architectures. Initially, the design center was referred to as "3M": 1 megapixel, 1 MIPS, and 1 megabyte.
The X server was quickly ported to a variety of workstations, to DOS, and to terminals. At the time, it was one of the few places where warring companies came together to bring a little bit of unity.
Remember that Jim Gettys was one of the original designers of X from its inception; he's REALLY BIG on backward compatibility, and wants to still be able to proudly declare that 2004's X clients will still display properly on a 1987 MicroVAX running the same protocol.
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Let me try to put things simply.
X is the name of the windowing-system project invented at MIT in the 1980's. It was the successor to 'W' (stood for 'Window').
X.org, formerly the X Consortium, a bunch of industry-types (HP, Dell, DEC, IBM), tasked with developing X.
XFree86.org started as a port of the X code to PCs, and for much of the late 1990's and early 2000's, was the standard-bearer of X development.
Freedesktop.org is an umbrella project for *NIX GUI development.
At MIT, X went through several incompatible protocol versions, culminating at X11. Version 11 of the X protocol is what most servers speak today. MIT then formed the X consortium, which continued to develop X.
At some point in the early 1990s, what would become XFree86 forked from the X Consortium code, and was intended as a distribution for PCs.
The X Consortium and XFree86 continued make releases, and merged code between them periodically. At some point, the X Consortium was renamed X.org. X.org releases went up to X11R6.6. XFree86 releases, which maintained their own version number, went up to XFree86 4.4 (4.3 corresponded roughly to the X11R6.6 code). During this time, XFree86 was the primary developer of X11.
After a license change at XFree86, and concerns about it's slow pace of development, X.org and freedesktop.org forked the XFree86 4.4 code (just prior to the license change), and released X11R6.7. X11R6.8 is the latest release from X.org/freedesktop.org
There is a great, detailed history here.
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