Dumping Aqua On Mac OS X For X11?

Sagefire asks: "Aqua is a beautiful interface but it can be incredibly resource intensive (especially for older/low-end machines). And, though the open source community has made great strides in reverse engineering proprietary drivers from Mac OS X, I would love to be able to simply keep using the drivers that came with it, for now. Since there is a fully functional BSD variant under the hood, is it possible (using X11.app, darwinports, and/or Fink) to boot to a command line and simply startx? Would it use less RAM to bypass Aqua?"

Comments

I tried that

[clang_jangle]

But even without running Aqua OS X is extremely resource-hungry. Test it yourself by logging in as username ">console" (without the quotes) for a command prompt and you'll see what I mean. Wish I had better news...

Re:I tried that

[the_humeister]

Not quite. The best way to test this is if you enter the command-line directly by either going into single-user mode or editing the /etc/ttys since these methods don't load Aqua at all. If you use the >console method, I don't think the system unloads Aqua from memory.

Don't Bother

[quanticle]

Is X11 really that much better than Aqua? I don't think so. Remember, Aqua has been optimized for Mac hardware. X11 (unless you've compiled it yourself) probably hasn't been optimized to as great of an extent. You can try switching, but I don't think you'll se much of an improvement with X11 vs. Aqua.

Re:Don't Bother

[muuh-gnu]

> Aqua has been optimized for Mac hardware. X11 (unless you've compiled it yourself) probably hasn't been optimized to as great of an extent.

Thats bullshit.

How do you think you can "optimize" some widget library for the hardware? You either have drivers for the graphic card running or you dont. Just recompiling some text editor doesnt "glue" it more to the underlying hardware. Or, by going with your logic, why couldnt someone just offer an "optimized" version of X for the Mac hardware in the first place?

Re:Don't Bother

[mpaque]

DPS (and the more recent OS X variant DPDF) goes back to 1988, with the introduction of NeXTSTep on the NeXT cube [wikipedia.org].

The Mac OS X window system and the Quartz and PDF rendering layers are completely new in Mac OS X, and do not share any code with the Display PostScript system from NeXTSTEP.

Re:Don't Bother

[seebs]

Well, actually, that would be rather wrong. One of the innovations of OS X's GUI is closer tie-ins with the rendering hardware; the GUI really does make more direct use of the GPU than a typical X11 interface does. The X11 interface is written in very generic terms to make rendering calls which are then handled in an optimized way... But it's still a bunch of separate rendering calls. Aqua knows quite a bit about what GPU features are necessarily available to it, and tweaks the GPU directly.

On the other hand, an X11 interface may well be enough simpler to more than make up the difference.

Re:Less RAM.

[maynard]

Bullshit.

I remember running a full 'nix with X11 and TWM with 4mb of RAM on a Sun 3/80. If you wanted color, a Sun 3/60 could handle it with 8mb; 16mb would give you a "screaming" 4 mips pizza box. When the Sun 3/80s and Sparc 1's came out, a 32mb system with a cg24 sbus card could get you full 24bit color with a megapixel display. And it had plenty of RAM to do real work.

Compare that with a 128mb or 256mb G3 CRT iMac and you've got way more than enough ram and CPU horsepower to run X11 with plenty of useful apps. Christ, I ran X11 on a 486 with 8mb of RAM and a 512kb XVGA card back in 1994 and it worked just fine. (And BTW: NeXTStep on an old cube ran DPS just great in 16mb of RAM too. It's not DPDF that's the hog - it's Aqua).

It's possible

[the_humeister]

But you're better off using something else (eg some Linux variant, BSD, etc.)

However, if you really want to try, do the following:

1) open /etc/ttys. The first two lines that begin with "console" has one which is commented out. Uncomment that one and comment out the second one. Now the next time you reboot, you'll enter the console directly

2) Install XDarwin, which can be started from the command-line as opposed to the X that Apple provides which can only be started alongside Aqua.

Have fun, but it's not really that interesting.

Yes, it's possible

[baryon351]

Since there is a fully functional BSD variant under the hood, is it possible (using X11.app, darwinports, and/or Fink) to boot to a command line and simply startx? Would it use less RAM to bypass Aqua?"

Yes, it's possible. At least, it was a few years ago, when I first installed KDE via fink then logged in at the login prompt as user ">console" (with no password) and performed a startx. I didn't use it for a terribly long time as a KDE-only box, and it was more an experiment to see what was possible - but it worked just like any other KDE setup. I didn't use Apple's own X11, but had XDarwin installed instead.

A note too - Aqua is only the default theme with OSX, and just describes the look of the OSX GUI. Quartz is the engine underneath that performance depends on. There was no noticeable difference in speed with XDarwin over Quartz, but perhaps that could be improved with more work on XDarwin.

Re:Why not use a better OS to do this?

[maynard]

Every Mac going back to the old Beige PPC 601 systems had 2D acceleration support.

Re:Why not use a better OS to do this?

[Lord Kano]

Hell, even the 68040(and 68LC040) Quadras had 2d acceleration.

LK

Re:What for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardware overlays are NOT provided by 3D hardware, it part of the
2D accelaration. It is no better today on a top end 3D card than
it was almost 10 years ago on a good 2D card.

Hardware overlays is a 2D blittler that puts YUV video on top of whatever the video card is outputting.

other services

[fermion]

I have OS X running on older G4 machines. I find the X11 performance on these machines, for instance OO.org, to as bad as the OS X performance, although the performance of most applications is good. Really, the only applications that are horrible are the iLife application, which run slow even on the high end G4 machines.

I will say this. Make sure that services that do not need to run, like the dock or Apache, are not running. If you want to run X11, things like emacs are great, if you get to know to use them. There is really no reason to not have most things running in X11, although I have gotten used to mail.app.

Of course, the big issue in these machines seems to be memory. *nix likes memory and always has. It has seldom been the OS for small footprints. Most G4 macs can accommodate at least 512 MB, and if you running a G3 mac, you likely have other difficulties.

Framebuffer vs 2D accel vs 3D accel

[Short Circuit]

You don't need 3D acceleration to speed up normal window manager tasks; Window manager tasks (for virtually all current X11 window managers) don't require them. What you need is support for your card's 2D acceleration functions.

Using a common desktop environment like stock GNOME or KDE (or such mildly reworked as with Ubuntu), try running X in framebuffer mode without DRI enabled, then try running X with the correct hardware-specific driver selected, but DRI disabled. Finally, try running X with DRI enabled.

That'll give you a good idea which portions of your video card's hardware acceleration are required for your normal desktop use.

Re:What I would like to know

[RAMMS EIN]

It's not exactly what you asked, but I just wanted to point out that, if you run Linux on a PowerPC Mac, you can run OS X (and OS 9, and earlier) apps. Using Mac-on-Linux, you can boot other Power Mac operating systems in their own virtual machines.

Re:Why not use a better OS to do this?

[jrockway]

You sound quite ignorant here. There are free (3d-accelerated) drivers for ATI cards called "ati". They work fine on PPC, and are fast enough to allow you to play ppracer (and friends).

If 2d isn't working acceptably, then you simply misconfigured the X Server. This might have been a problem 20 or so years ago, but nowadays it's fine.

I recently switched my old Powerbook G4 from OS X 10.4 to Kubuntu/Dapper Drake, and I find it much more responsive and easier to use. All the nicities of the Powerbook still work fine (notably power management, suspend/resume is nice'n'fast just like in OS X), but you the good OSS apps run much better. (KOffice / KMail/ amaroK / etc. Sorry, Apple's cheap imitations just don't cut it for me.)

Re:And so you bought a mac because?

[RAMMS EIN]

``And so you bought a mac because?''

Maybe because he likes the hardware? I know that's why I've been buying iBooks (unfortunately, they have been discontinued). Good battery life, easy to carry, well supported by Linux, and, as far as I can tell, pretty durable.

Re:Less RAM.

[BigBuckHunter]

I can confirm that Gentoo runs well on an old 266mhz green G3 new world IMac. The machine had 192MB of ram and I used it to test DR17 (get-e.org) on PPC. The biggest problem was installing the DRM drivers for the ATI Rage chip (Have to pull them from CVS). Aside from that everything seemed to work fine, as long as you disabled kernel pre-empt (this might be fixed in modern kernels).

BBH

Re:Why not use a better OS to do this?

[Lord Apathy]

KDE is slower when compaired to running a unencumbered fvwm2 desktop. Don't get me wrong, KDE and Gnome are very nice projects. They have done wonders to help the transition to linux from winblows. But there is just something to building a desktop from scratch and watching it run like a cat with a bottle rocket up its arse.

Re:Less RAM.

[Anonymous Coward]

I call bullshit on your bullshit.

Yes, you *can* run an ancient version of X11 with twm on little RAM; it wasn't very snappy, it didn't offer modern features you expect (like lots of colors), and it offered basically no features (even hardcore Linux geeks today don't run twm).

X11 takes less memory than Aqua if you run it in monochrome mode with a window manager that can barely manage windows. Is that news? I don't think "monochrome X11 with twm" is what he was asking about.

OTOH, I'm using right now the slowest/cheapest Mac you can buy (1.66GHz Core Duo -- the only 32-bit Mac you can buy! -- with Intel GMA950 graphics) and it absolutely screams at graphics. What with doing almost all graphics work on the graphics card these days, it's fast. Really fast. I've never seen a stable X11 setup so fast.

(For starters, most X11 setups still need to redraw a window when it's exposed -- even with a fast CPU, it's noticable. Yes, I know you're running a fancy new compositing manager and it looks just as slick as Aqua. I tried the latest code a couple weeks ago, and it was marginally stable, and completely unusable. Come back when it's the default install for all setups.)

For another example, look again at that ArsTechnica page: Quartz2D is now much faster than QuickDraw (and will become even faster when they flip the switch on Quartz2D Extreme). Not only is that impressive by itself, but I don't see those kind of performance improvements from X11.

Re:What an incredibly informative post

[BigBuckHunter]

you cumshitting mouth-breather. it is pathetic that you take pride in running Nigger Linux on anything, much less a Mac, much less thinking anyone gives a shit.

That's awesome! I can now skip my daily visit to bash.org! I prefer to refer to Gentoo as a "Shit Vortex of incompatibility and misconfiguration", though it is not masicism that drives me run it, but a sense of duty. I find, report, and fix package bugs before they ever see the light of day in your "Whitey" distros. All I can really say is "You're Welcome".

Thanx For the chuckle,
BBH