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Fifteen Years of X
From: rws@mit-bold (Robert W. Scheifler)
To: window@athena
Subject: window system X
Date: 19 Jun 1984 0907-EDT (Tuesday)
I've spent the last couple weeks writing a window system for the VS100. I stole a fair amount of code from W, surrounded it with an asynchronous rather than a synchronous interface, and called it X. Overall performance appears to be about twice that of W. The code seems fairly solid at this point, although there are still some deficiencies to be fixed up.
We at LCS have stopped using W, and are now actively building applications on X. Anyone else using W should seriously consider switching. This is not the ultimate window system, but I believe it is a good starting point for experimentation. Right at the moment there is a CLU (and an Argus) interface to X; a C interface is in the works. The three existing applications are a text editor (TED), an Argus I/O interface, and a primitive window manager. There is no documentation yet; anyone crazy enough to volunteer? I may get around to it eventually.
Anyone interested in seeing a demo can drop by NE43-531, although you may want to call 3-1945 first. Anyone who wants the code can come by with a tape. Anyone interested in hacking deficiencies, feel free to get in touch.
As far as I can tell the Y Windows pages are just design documents. There's no code for download. That and the date of the last news (February 1998) suggests nothing ever came of it, which is a shame as the things they were suggesting (sane colour management and direct video access instead of X protocol requests for local clients) all seem fairly sensible IMO.
Berlin actually looks rather more ambitious, being based on CORBA and a very OO model. Unfortunately X probably won't be replaced anytime soon because of the massive existing base of applications. You can be sure whatever replaces it will still be lumbered with having to be able to do X emulation...
Andrew
15 years of tacking on more code, adding more bugs. This is one of many programs that would be enhanced if it started from clean slate (Several Mickeysoft Operating Systems included). Kill the beast!
The whole deal about X being bloated is not so... For example, Windows :) takes up about 100 more meg than X, WITHOUT any GOOD software, and gives you a complimentary crash every few minutes... I personally like how X runs, and it's features... It's fairly fast, just as fast as the others, if not faster...
;)
:)
If you want to put the Windows Virus on your computer that's up to you
Plus, if X took up twice the disk space as windows I'd still use it
Unixware's X-inside-a-browser is pretty damned amazing... I forget what it's called.
Someone ought to ask jg@w3c.org to put in is 2cents on this thread.
Nope.
Berlin is at http://www.berlin-consortium.org
Y windows is at http://www.hungry.com/products/Ywindows
YAX is at http://yax.netpaedia.net
Posted by stodge:
15 years, and surely past its sell by date. Must be time for a replacement?
http://www13.w3.org/People/Gettys/
I agree. Though SCSI has been historically much better than IDE, and still probably is in most systems that NEED to be up 24/7, there are some cool things happening on the IDE front. Check out Promise's Ultra66 controller card. (www.promise.com) I haven't seen one of these in action but I came across it while looking for a controller to put a big disk into an old system. According to the specs this thing does 66MB over PCI which breaks the SCSI speed barrier. I don't know how reliable it is, but it's interesting to see what's on the cutting edge ... They've also got some IDE raid array controllers, hmmm...
Posted by d106ene5:
What I'm looking for here is any clue that you actually have any idea what you are talking about or of you are simply picking up on the "x is crap" meme that is pervasive in slashdot.
While I agree that it would be travisty to include widgets in X, it would be great to at least include widget definitions in X. This would solve a ton of problems and even make X run lighter on the network.
Widgets do not have to be an all or nothing propasition. X could (maybe should) provide an interface and let the server (user) decide how they want the widgets to render.
Replacements? Sure.... There's X2, X3, X4, X5, etc. Right now, we are up to the eleventh major version of X, and the sixth major release of that version.
True, in 1984, the author of X knew that it was a start, but in 1991, Linus knew that the small kernel he had was a start, as well. We aren't using the same Linux as we were in 1991, and we aren't using the same X as we were in 1984.
The Unix Hater's Handbook is an amusing swipe at Unix culture, but it comes across as a 'real programmers' manifesto. If you dont know what I mean, read the Jargon File's entries on older operating systems. A kind of snobbery about older and less successful OS's pervades old time hacker lore. This is quite amusing, as Unix has become far more than it's contemparies ever hoped to, although at the time Unix compared poorly to the design goals of say Multics.
This elitism extends to X. Of course X is hardware dependent to the extent that it requires some graphical capabilities of the systen it's running on, but it still does a damn good job of running on myriad different platforms. X is a great idea (the whole client-server principle reversed) and quote well implemented.
It's just a damn shame that the open-endeness of it's design goals and implementation are exploited by luddites and f*ckwits as an excuse for a little trolling.
Chris Wareham
Try the BeOS out .. You will love the speed ....
and stability
Aristotle's school was the Lyceum; the "lectures" were given will walking around, hence it is also known as the peripatetic(sp?) school.
Plato's school was the Academy.
I was thinking along the lines of replacing the whole bloated mess, not incremental revisions to it. Something like the Berlin project looks promising, but nowhere near completion...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Don't worry!
only six more months of that left...
:)
It seams to me that X and modern 3D rendering cards clash in some major ways. With this setup, it requires that the cliant pass the X server all the 3D information, which seams like a waste of bandwidth since alot of the information is thrown away anyway, or atleast compressed ( a 256x256 texture that is far away in the Z axis wont take up a 256x256 patch on the screen). It seams as though a better approach of X based 3D would be a daughter board (PCI card etc..) that would render the 3D sceen to a memory buffer on the cliant machine. The Cliant software would then read this memory buffer, and incorperate it into the information sent to the X server. That way, you could have one high end 3D rendering card, and the information would then be send to any number of X servers, local or remote. While playing Quake with an X term may not get you the fastest frame rates, it whold be very good for CAD or something like that. I think SGI does something like this. does anyone know if this can be done with an x86 machine, and what kind of hardware/software would be needed.
The buzzing you're hearing is from the video card. There is tons of noise going on inside your computer video cards typically produce a good amount's worth. As the video card has to redraw the position of the mouse on the display, the extra work by the vid. card is picked up as radiation by the sound card and affects the output on the sound card. I'm no genius so I don't quite know how to explain it properly, but I do know that the video is the culprit.
Most people with project studios seeking to get the most out of their sound cards while keeping a relatively low noise floor typically move the sound card and video card as physically far apart as they can. Usually the sound car is placed at the bottom of the machine and the vid. card near the power supply. I remember older modems I'd purchase making the same suggestion and I imagine it's for the same reason.
Creative Labs cards aren't very good at keeping their noise clean, that's why they're not considered much of a project card. Turtle Beach cards are pretty good at keeping their sound clean and you could get a montego for relatively cheap, a a new project studio version of the montego has come out for $349 that will do optical/analog S/PDIF digital output to your stereo (if you're really worried about noise and want a complete gaming experience) as well as support for quad speakers.
-=Knowledge of software commands does not mean mastery of concepts=-
The Mac may look nice but up untill Mac OS X (oh wait OS X hasn't shipped yet just OS X Server) both pragramming and stabillity sucked! I speak from experiance. The mac uses a unified memory model - meaning any app can over write the OS or any other app.
From a user persective Mac OS may be cool but from a coding persective it sucks! On the other hand some of the windows managers you just ripped on have very nice program ability.
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
"SPOOOOOOOOON!" - The Tick, The Tick
The MGR windowing system is pretty cool. Its a lot more lightweight than X, as it is monolithic
If there was a decent graphical web browser for MGR, I might be using it instead. One of these (days, months, years), I may get around to coding one....
Check this, W was created by merging two U's hence the term double U.
I've got one of those machines. They are very nice and small. Unfortunately there seems to be a problem with the bios or something, and it doesn't boot (it starts humming, but that is about it). It had been left off for about a year, so it may have been something to do with battery backed up boot code or something.
If anyone knows how to fix one of these things, I would like to know (I can't find any info on Sony's web site -- I think they have disowned the product line).
I suspect that it was the Xerox Star.
Some details about this system at:
http://cec.wustl.edu/~djw1/aui/read3.htm
The only times I ever used them was for page layout type stuff.
-Kevin
Hmm.. Now where do I get this Dreyers Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Ice cream here in Germany? :-D
As far as the display technology that OS X is using, my understanding is that it's something called Quartz, which is basically a bastardization of some DPS stuff mixed with some of Adobe's newer PDF technology. (This is my understanding of it, anyway.)
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
No big deal, no long winded diatribe... Just this:
The X Window System has been around since BEFORE Linux desktop environments like GNOME and KDE were created. BEFORE, *NOT* AFTER. Please get that right from now on. Linux has utilized this system since not long after it (Linux) was conceived.
When I see one Linux desktop group or another (people who have been following the Linux desktop press know which one I'm singling out more) getting sole credit for giving Linux users an alternative to the command line interface, I get seriously peeved.
Get your history straight, and please stop crediting the proliferation of Linux graphic systems incorrectly. The X Window System existed long before Linux was even an itch in Linus' crotch. GNOME and KDE run on TOP of X, and before GNOME and KDE there were plenty of other windowing systems that ran on TOP of X. This is nothing new...
That was the Xerox Star (or possibly its predecessor, the 4100.) These were the
machines that supposedly influenced the
design of the Apple Lisa, and thereby the
Mac.
I advocate the use of Linux and X as much as I can
ok, please don't take this as a flame, it is not meant as a flame, but simply a question you maybe should think about. The question is:
Why do you advocate the use of X when you don't know what it is?
kind regards,
Per
Not really. X is more just a networked graphical layer on the console. The actual GUI itself is created via your selection of window manager and applications (and by proxy, widget sets as well). X itself is pretty simple - I think the core wire protocol consists of like 5 or 6 messages. All X does is manage the actual drawing to the display device, and the user input.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
XF86's source code is bigger than the kernel. 'nuff said.
Yes, I think we all know SCSI's an interface type (there ARE a lot of geeks around here, y'know). I personally don't like IDE - much too needy of host CPU time. Of course, it's not like I can really afford to go all SCSI on my home machine - that's the only reason I find IDE an acceptible substitute, because I can't afford better. :)
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Pick up a non-commercial copy of VisualWorks from www.objectshare.com and join the cult.. :)
SmallTalk *is* cool. And the guru's that program business systems with it still to this day get obscene salaries ($150k +)
-Stu
Sounds cute, but when I need to do some halfway serious work over a slow connection, I just run emacs (the original text-oriented windowing system).
Now if you thought of this "T" project as a method of running X windows from inside of emacs, you would have the immediate support from the emacs faithful. I suggest asking around on alt.religion.emacs.
I ran windows 95 on a DX2/80 with 4 meg once. It took TEN SECONDS to open the start menu. This is OK speed ?
DONT TREAD ON ME MOÎΩN ÎABÃ
It used to be at ftp.x.org, I think. About 6 years ago. I don't know what happened to it.
Don't even think about it!
I'm presuming said chocolate is American, and Americans only tolerate their 'chocolate' because they've never tasted the proper stuff... Hershey? YUCK!!!
But then of course, what with Belgian chocolate now apparently being poisoned....
COOL! I just tried this (I'm using E and Gnome), and my window depth changes (ie, when I click on the Netscape window and it pops in fron of my terminals), really sped up a lot (I had to restart the X server first). It went from about a half second delay (which was bugging the crap out of me) to instantaneous. Thanks!
X server and NT are two different paradigms.
NT is a OS with all of its functionality included.
X is a graphics server (not an OS). Thus NT may have more functionality than X but that point is irrelevant anyway. It is like saying my computer is more functional than my basket ball.
I love his comments..."this is a good start", "there are some deficiencies"...15 years later people are still patching this in X or that, and for code that was a "start" it's still kicking :)
Who am I?
Why am here?
Where is the chocolate?
What is your Slash Rating?
Actually w/ some cards (at least the 3dfx banshee) the controll registers get included too. So you see a minimum of 48megs of ram.
-matt
So, when do we start working on 'Y'?
--
I get that once in awhile on my new PC, and quite a bit more often on the ol' 486. Both using MS windows, I been to lazy to touch Linux since I installed it *curse winmodem*. :(
My sound card is a fairly good one too.
it also takes a whole bunch of processor, well it did on our PII300 and rendered a p200 almost unusable, compleetly hogging the whole procesor.
matguy
Net. Admin.
matguy(.com)
haha Tape, I like that!
Maybe he/she was once a windows user and changed :>
over to an OS like linux with X and he/she found it to be an improvement. You don't need to be an
expert to judge whether something is better or
not. But it sure helps.
Why was X so bad for application developers? There were dozens of reasons, but a key one is that X failed to specify a UI, so applications had to be developed for all the competing Widget sets (it took a decade for Motif to become the standard). In addition, X required mastery of 7 thick volumes of manuals, it was slow or impossible to do many common display tasks, and it was terrible for users. Editing X resource files is still one of the prime examples of horrible user interface designs. I've done a lot of X programming, and still am unable to simple user tasks such as change fonts and default window sizes for many applications. X has sent many a Windows user scurrying back to Microsoft.
How did such a terrible interface become the UNIX standard? Well, DEC and IBM hated UNIX at the time, and were glad to promote something bad. Sun played right into their hands by insisting that only its window system would be used, and then once it lost the battle it drove the final nail in the coffin by refusing to standardize on Motif. So, it is an example of how all the major UNIX vendors managed to kill the dominant non-Microsoft approach.
No Microsoft conspiracy or dirty tricks were required--UNIX vendors were happy to cut their own throats. Linux is still severely damaged by the lack of a user interface standard.
I believe Win95 requires 8MB. You must be thinking of Win3.1 or OS/2.
I ran X windows on a 486 running a 8MHZ! And it felt plenty zippy opening rxvt windows using the twm window manager. It was running at 8MHZ because I forgot to attach the "turbo" button. It was a bit sluggish with only 4MB but with 8 or 16MB it was fast.
Oh, and X crashes a lot less than your average win95 setup. And it's Y2K compliant.
I think that it's interesting that X has been around for 15 years (although what's more is the W bit, I'll have to look into what that was). Obviously, a tremendous amount of development and tweaking has gone into it, and yet I have seen many people complain that it's slow, bloated, etc...I'm not a coder (but I hope to be...college freshman this fall, in fact), so I have no idea as to the validity of those statements.
Another thing, to my knowledge, there isn't another mainstream OS/GUI that uses the X client/server model (or is there?) so I guess that there isn't much to compare it to, unless you consider Berlin, but it's not quite so complete as to be a valid comparison.
Bleh, or I could just be blithering about nothing...but the moderators will deal with that, eh? *g*
Simple Question:
Have you been under a rock for five years or something. There are much more than three apps
that run under X today. Although truetype fonts
would be nice.
Has anyone ever seen W, or do you have the source? I'd be interested in playing with it. I guess thats just me and my fetish with old computer stuff. ;)
sig11
Sometimes I have heard people talk about SCSI in
such a high light that I begin to think they
forget that SCSI is just an interface.
Anyway, I think we can all agree that SCSI is better
than IDE but IDE drives are still "real HDs."
Someone wrote a how to build a perfect linux box essay (easy to find on yahoo of google) that seemed to suggest that it is better to have a 386 with scsi then pentium ten thousand with IDE.
Given that the X window system is not a GUI
(e.g. provides no widgets, thus giving rise to toolkits
like Qt and Gtk), it sure is one big beast.
Can you say bloat?
how big a tape did you have to have ?
ah well
a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
Sure, and Sunview (1988 era) on sun hardware was competing with Domain/DM on Apollo hardware...
This meant that apps written for workstations got written for sunview (ie. one very small step above sun frame buffer; recall that under sunview, the application had to hand control
back to the "window manager" *explicitly* when you detected the mouse was leaving the window...) or for Domain, and
(since Apollo was the "first" workstation vendor that was doing any kind of volume...)
I worked with various groups back then showing them that they could code to X11, *once*, and then have code that worked on Apollos *and* Suns, and even put up windows on these new, cheap $10,000 x86 PCs...
The fact that X had been ported to everything from the Amiga to the Cray (client only, but crays didn't have any "glass" anyhow) was a *major* selling point.
This actually saved a *huge* amount of fragmentation of the unix-workstation field...
Motif was created (mostly) by HP and DEC. My understanding is that the reason they banded together was to combat Sun. The company created to combat Sun was known as The Open Software Foundation (I almost worked there). They are now known as the Open Group. You may remember seeing them in the news as they were supposed to write an open spec for some Microsoft product (maybe active X? -- it was a big deal at the time, but I don't think the spec ever got released).
This last week I've installed Linux on a computer in our lab, and thanks to the X server on my NT box I can now live a decent life. It not only looks really cool to have the gnome panel there in the corner, but it works perfectly and is fast. I've seen windows apps display on remote NT boxes, and I can tell you that's not nice.
About the MS Windows window manager: you can replace it, and there are several alternatives. Unfortunately, the title bars and dragging of windows is somehow provided by the application process, and I'm not sure much can be changed about that (unless MS goes Open Source).
Not to bad. SunView (which was relatively simple to program) survived with SunOS4 (and the 1st SparcStations). However, Openlook was declared the future and so SunView slowly faded away.
So at the beginning of the 90's, there were three X Toolkits, Openlook, Motif, and Athena Widgets (Xaw). Openlook was supported by Sun and AT&T, Motif by the Open Software Foundation (e.g., HP, IBM, DEC), and Xaw by MIT's Project Athena. There were other toolkits, but they were not part of Xt.
Then there were Next (NextStep using Display Postscript) and SGI. The original SGI Personal Irises had a GUI called Max (was this GL or DPS?). IIRC, it then changed to NeWS, and finally to SGI's version of xdm.
If you go back even further, there were Apollo's DomainOS (GUI/WM?) and whatever IBM ran on their RT workstations. There was also DecWindows, but I never got the chance to play with this sucker so I don't know what it consisted of.
FWIW, I have a copy of the first printing of X Toolkit Manual. There's one great line in the acknowledgments.
We are grateful to Sony Microsystems for the loan of a Sony NEWS workstation running their implementation of the X Window System.
Sony?
"Windows doesn't have this distinction between mechanism and policy, so if I decide that I don't like the way the title-bar buttons work, I'm SOL:" I happen to be one of the lowly dual-booters, the people who can't decide between micros~1 and linux. I decided a long time ago that I didn't like the way the windows GUI behaved, and I changed it. It's fast coming to the point where you don't have to be imprisoned by the taskbar to get work done. This is a prime example.
Karma: Dyn-o-mite!(mostly affected by Jimmy Walker reading your comments)
...is like comparing apples and oranges. Windows
is an entire operating system, X is only a windowing and display system.
One can argue that X does carry around a fair ammount of baggage, but at the same time, one of it's design goals was to be as portable as possible, and with that usually comes some extra baggage. X itself is not that large, a lot of the 'bloat' comes from all the libraries that now are standard to find with an installation. So along those lines, you could make the argument that X as a usual install is getting big, but so be it. Find something that can do everything that it can (before someone says it, no, Photon can not) that's smaller.
I have neither installed this, nor looked at its code, but I like the name and the design philosophy: http://yax.netpedia.net/
> Some days, it looks like slashdot is nothing more than a warm, fuzzy feeling, for losers who have nothing to SAY.
Nice of you to join us.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I believe with since Irix 4, SGI has used X as it's windowing system. I think they used NeWS before then. The last time I used an SGI workstation (1995), I enjoyed it very much. It had a desktop environment, which I rarely used. They used Motif, but with a special X resource variable set, it could use SGI's chrome which would make Motif actually look good. Actually, given a choice between a SGI workstation and a Linux machine, I'd probably take the SGI machine for the OpenGL support, ImageVision, and the other neat features they threw in.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Here! Here!
The whole oracle/java NC (network computer) thing
kinda boggled me cuz X does everything that NCs
would do. I bet a lot of engineers at NEC and other xterm makers felt silly designing NCs after
years of building xterms.
I have the same problem-- moving my PS/2 mouse causes a buzzing noise. It could well be a problem with my hardware setup, but I've noticed it with several cards.
First Setup-- el-cheapo OPL-3SAX card (I think) with a Trident 975 graphics card.
Second: Creative Labs AudioPCI (ES1371) with Trident 975
Current Setup: ES1371 sound card with i740 graphics card
The CDROM drive does seem to produce a lot of noise, though. It's an ACER 32x model. This model seems to have a really shitty D/A converter-- s/n is ~75 dB. The noise comes in on the CD channel.
The NeXT cubes were only about $200. I think there is a project to get Linux to run on these type machines too.
The intel Paragon supercomputers and encrypting ethernet equipment were cool also. Too bad I don't have the money or space. =(
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Please,
man X
Its NOT X windows its the X window system.
UGH...............
The support of the emacs faithful? That, plus a buck fifty, will buy me a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor. Lethe, I wade your shores tonight!
1) TrueType fonts may be used. You need a (free) program named xfttf (I think, or xfsttf maybe, I've forgotten). It runs as an X font server. 2) The "disadvantages" (except cut-n-paste) of X, according to that text, is, what I think, its advantages. The lack of a built-in window management is good. To allow externa font-servers is good. The only bad with X is the clipboard. I like the mouse-bindings for copy/paste, but I sure do not like to only be able to copy and paste text. I really hope someone will hack a generic clipboard-functionallity. And not only in GTK or Qt! A _generic_ on! But I may be just dreaming...
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
that's why a new berlin widget set had to be coded,i don't think there's a lot of widget set who are corba compliant.
Canadian AC CanadianAC@NOSPAM.telebot.net
I can see Both sides, and just posted something to get more discussion going. X maybe bloated, but I still like it... I bash Windows because I don't like Microsoft in general witht he whole "We're better than everyone" approach... But that's a different story ;) :)
Anyone experimented with something that you thought was better than X? If so lemie know
Actually, if I remember correctly, the ONC RPC library was made available in source form before XView was (just the RPC library, not NFS server or client code), so it wasn't Sun's first opened source.
I read something on that. It said that the UDMA/66 didn't run at full speed very often.. It wasn't much of an improvement over regular ATA IDE (20 MBPS). And it boggs down the processor some... We've got UDMA/33 on most new machines. That actually runs at 33 MBPS. UW SCSI II runs over 80 MBPS. If you see something saying we're faster then SCSI, this is only true of older SCSI [SCSI I, SCSI II (not ultra wide)].
-- Ace
I have some Mac friends that like to go around telling everyone that Windows was a rip off of the Mac GUI. I like to laugh at them and tell them that the Mac GUI wasn't an original idea either. The only problem is I don't know all the details as to what all came before. If someone knows any information that would be helpful I would apreciate it.
-Chris (too lazy to set up an account)
Old code is like a classic car, its simple and elegant. Its often has a perfect non-bloated structure for hot rod conversions. It is simple to understand and parts are easy to drop into other projects. Unlike hot rod conversions, rebuilding old code does not scrape the knuckles, or cost money for parts or licensing fees. When compiled, its often very fast and the eye candy at large gatherings of computer enthusiasts. Many people collect old code, keep it in its pristine state or fix it up. Sometimes it is hard to see in a world of hype and marketing, but will always be in style.
But one thing is for sure: old code will never die. There are always people who swear the best old code is GNU, but just has been reborn!
That said, I'd love to see on-board SCSI MBs drop in price, and SCSI HDDs, too, to compete with IDE more effectively. I just don't see that happening any time soon.
--
Get your fresh, hot kernels right here!
I wonder if Adobe would be amenable to an OS that fully__ implemented their PDF font rendering spec, which they hoped to make the next generation Apple type engine? Might that OS have an advantage in having the closest relationship between onscreen display and printed output? If SGI and Adobe teamed up they could make a free *nix based workstation that does everything Adobe wants exactly the way they want it done. SGI might seriously penetrate the graphics design industry and sell some (relative) volume, which they are unlikely to achieve with MS NT as a partner/boat-anchor.
Those disk packs could be RL01 & RL02's they are 5 and 10 mb each
You are _wrong_ it provides much more than
a 2D display. It provides transparent network
operations, remote display capabilities,
hardware acceleration for video boards, and
I'm not mentioning things like DGA, XIE, etc..
Also, your mind must be sleeping, or you have not
read enough XFree86 documentation. In XFree86
you can use the LinkKit to relink your Xserver
with only your selected hardware drivers into it.
This is much the same as recompiling the Kernel
and manages to rid you of all code needed for the
video cards you don't have.
Please, know your facts before spreading FUD.
Yours truly
AC
You do realize that this is purely opinion, don't you? I like X better for its flexibility. A good program is like a good tool--using Windows or the Mac for GUI development is like giving an artist a choice between crayons or colored pencils. X lets you use anything--charcoal, oil paints, whatever--if you can figure it out...
I can't stand MacOS or NeXT's idea of either Style or cApItAlIzAtIOn... Maybe Steve Jobs wants to be 31337. As for Style, what does Style (with a capital S) mean? There's no universal concept of Style. There's your concept, and there's Steve Jobs' concept, and they don't mesh with *my* concept. So offer some facts instead of opinions.
For my part, I've seen GUIs and Apps under X that resemble Windows, MacOS, NeXT, etc, etc. So where's your Style now?
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Among '80s style window systems, X11 is still the best, even if it is flawed in many ways. SunView/OpenView was just uninspired. And NeWS was a great idea, it was just based on the wrong language and required too many resources for the machines it was running on.
The ideas behind NeWS finally were implemented better as: Java. Same guy (Gosling), and with Java2D, you even get roughly the same imaging model. Plus, you get server extensibility, 3D, multimedia, sound, telephony, etc.
It was a master's project by Paul Asente,
last seen around Adobe.
The fad in the UNIX world at that time was to
name software packages with a single letter-
"B" and "C" for languages, "S" a stat package
at AT&T and "W", "X", "V" graphics packages
The Xerox computers, Windoze, Macs, XWindows,
Sun3, VAXen,
ran clunky until 10 MIPs computers became
common place i the early 90s.
on the last part of that I can argue that point as I imagine it is taken out of context. It probably referrs to reliability rather than speed. For something small, say a name server for a small group of web servers, which needs to be pretty damned solid (it does no good to have a web server running if it can't be found as I have learned a few times the hard way) I could understand forgoing speed for stability. I don't think I would go so far as to run a 386, but a low end 486 does a whole lot in the server arena and from my experience the are often more stable than most PII's, be it actually more stable or just not as affected by heat, if I don't have to deal with it I see it as being more stable.
For the real argument though, SCSI speed isn't the only factor to the argument, again stability is the key there. Anyone that has run with both will usually tell you that the error rate on a scsi drive is much less than ide, for a couple of reasons.
First, since like what was talked above, the processor handles much more of the i/o of ide than scsi. With this in mind you must remember that processors constantly make mistakes that are cought by the os and resolved before probelms arise (some os's do this better than others, hint hint) so when an ide job is being handled by the processor and an error occurs that is not cought by the os then this error is passed on to the drive. The more that is being handled by the processor the more errors can be passed along to it.
Second, current ide standard is udma, which is at the edge of what is capable through the aging hardware specification. This in mind, would you want to rely on an old technology pushed to it's limit. no.
Third, multiple drives, most good servers don't have one hard drive and one cd rom and call it good. Most will have a dedicated boot and system drive, another drive for data (be it web, ftp, or local file service,) add to that some type of backup drive and the defacto cd rom and you've filled up some ide ports, not to mention that you have 2 on each port running master and slave, which I don't care what anyone tells you it does pose problems besides speed.
So there you go, 3 real good reasons not to go for IDE, without going into speed issues. That is if you can affford it.
matguy
Net. Admin.
matguy(.com)
The industry did not widely adopt C++ until the
late 80's. So organziations cludged their way
through psuedo-OOP GUIs like X/Xt/Motif and SunView.
Even Steve Jobs "inbetween" company NeXT guessed
wrong and used ObjectiveC, a C++ competitor,
in their early systems.
GUIs are natural application for OOPs with
their hierachical data structures, dynamic
memory usage, etc. Xerox Star almost got it
right with OOP SmallTalk on their early graphical
computers, but never really distributed it.
Laugh all you like, but Apple made many meaningful contributions to GUI development. I'm not sure of the precise timing, but the basic components of GUIs were all invented before the creation of Xerox PARC in 1970. I posted this to /. some time back. Look up Vannevar Bush, Ivan Sutherland, Alan Kay, Douglas Englebart, Jeff Raskin. However, Apple added very meaningfully to these concepts with innovations such as direct manipulation, the menu bar, and region-based drawing. Apple was also the first to price it under $10,000. Just because Apple did use ideas from earlier works doesn't mean Windows isn't a Mac rip-off.
EOF.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
The fact that it doesn't happen in Windows is a little puzzling. Perhaps the gain is turned down more in Windows? It could also be the driver. The driver can actually make a difference in the amount of interference you get.
It most certainly can. Some instructions generate a lot of RFI, for example, multiplies and divides... because these instructions generate activity on a vast expanses of chip real-estate that normally like dormant. Not only do they generated RFI, but heat as well, which you'll notice if you're running a laptop (the fan speeds up.)
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Ok, preamble/disclaimer: I'm not an entirely disinterested party here, so if any moderator out there feels this is inappropriate, feel free to moderate it down into oblivion.
:-)
But. I work for a company called Attachmate; we write (among other things) an X Window server for MS-Windows (called Extra! X). One of the features our particular server offers, is for the user to specify their own (unix/X) window manager. This means that if you don't like the Windows wm (which provides the title bar, window frame and so on), you can specify your own (presumably residing on the same host as the client apps you want to run), which can be any wm you choose (WMaker, fvwm2, kwm, Enlightenment, IceWM and so on...).
Now, even though it may sound like it, I'm not plugging our particular product, as such. The reason being that we gear towards corporate users, and so include many features that most people probably have no need for. The product tends to be pricey (I don't have exact figures, but it's up in the 100's of dollars US per seat).
We are also firmly closed source. (I hang my head in shame
However, what I am getting at is that there is a wide variety of X servers for MS-Windows out there. If you are happy with yours, fine. But if the ability to select a different wm from the one supplied by MS-Windows is something that interests you, then you may want to check out some of the others, many of which are probably less pricey than the one I mentioned, or may even be free (beer/speech). And they may have that capability (of choosing your own window manager).
I'm afraid I can't really recommend any, since the only ones I know well are in the same market as ours, and so operate in much the same price range. If you're really interested, companies such as Persoft and Hummingbird, to name a few, also make high-end "enterprise-level" X servers for Windows.
Anyway... just some food for thought, more than anything else.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
> "Screensaver? cat /dev/mem"
:-)
Hmmm... my impression was always that screensavers were NOT supposed to create giant security holes...
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
Sony did make a mips-based computer called NEWS, but I don't know if Sony was called Sony Microsystems.
DecWindows is a rather nice thing, it is still there in the latest version of Ultrix 4.5, It have almost the same apps as the newer Motif desktop that camw with Ultrix and Digital Unix (Not CDE)
Hmmm, doesn't CORBA use sockets? Couldn't it be viewed as an abstract layer on top of sockets? Am I being nit-picky and facetious?
Very strange. (And pretty annoying, actually.)
Hmm. While typing this I just realized typing at the keyboard causes the problem as well. (Though, less noticably... you need to hold down a key to really hear it.) Something to do with serial interrupts?
search for "Doug Engelbart"
This will never happen. Text-apps that need windowing use curses... Kludging a TTY server for X might be possible but it would be useless, most X apps simply wouldn't be usable on such an interface.
Well, someone had to post this. I first saw this message in, I think, 1987. I don't know where it originated.
X
DANGEROUS VIRUS
First, a little history. The X window system escaped from Project Athena at MIT where it was being held in isolation. When notified, MIT stated publicly that "MIT assumes no responsibility....". This is a very disturbing statement. It then infiltrated Digital Equipment Corporation, where it has since corrupted the technical judgement of this organization.
After sabotaging Digital Equipment Corporation, a sinister X consortium was created to find a way to use X as part of a plan to dominate and control interactive window systems. X windows is sometimes distributed by this secret consortium free of charge to unsuspecting victims. The destructive cost of X can not even be guessed.
X is truly obese - whether it's mutilating your hard disk or actively infesting your system, you can be sure its up to no good. Innocent users need to be protected from this dangerous virus. Even as you read this, the X source distribution and the executable environment created is being maintained on hundreds of computers - maybe even your own.
Digital Equipment Corporation is already shipping machines that carry this dreaded infestation. It must be destroyed.
This is what happens when software with good intentions goes bad. It victimizes innocent users by distorting their perception of what is and what is not good software. This malignant window system must be destroyed.
Ultimately DEC and MIT must be held accountable for this heinous _software crime_, brought to justice, and made to pay for a _software cleanup_. Until DEC and MIT answer to these charges, they both should be assumed to be protecting dangerous software criminals.
DON'T BE FOOLED!! JUST SAY NO TO X.
X windows. A mistake carried out to perfection. X windows. Dissatisfaction guaranteed. X windows. Don't get frustrated without it. X windows. Even your dog won't like it. X windows. Flakey and built to stay that way. X windows. Complex nonsolutions to simple nonproblems. X windows. Flawed beyond belief. X windows. Form follows malfunction. X windows. Garbage at your fingertips. X windows. Ignorance is our most important reesource. X windows. It could be worse, but it'll take time. X windows. It could happen to you. X windows. Japan's secret weapon. X windows. Let it get in YOUR way. X windows. Live the nightmare. X windows. More than enough rope. X windows. Never had it. Never will. X windows. No hardware is safe. X windows. Power tools for Power Fools. X windows. Power tools for power losers. X windows. Putting new limits on productivity. Simplicity made complex. X windows. The Cutting Edge of Obsolescence. X windows. The art of incompetence. X windows. The defacto substandard. X windows. The first fully modular software disaster. X windows. The joke that kills. X windows. The problem for your problem. X windows. There's got to be a better way. X windows. Warn your friends about it. X windows. You'd better sit down. X windows. You'll envy the dead.
Y'know, people in the biz want these things, Intel processor an' all. I want one dammit! It has one problem: NT. Everyone has heard the horror stories about that (font and color management) People I know who absolutely sneer at PC hardware are ready to believe the pc-based SGI creams the best G3 sight unseen, without a page of test results. That's a market.
I'm not totally sure, but weren't Next's always hellaciously more expensive? The SGI is more, but close enough. Any comparison to a G3 doing open and/or save on big files shows a striking advantage for the SGI. There's a compelling reason right there. SGI has incredible cachet with people in graphics. If it wasn't for the MS on the drive, we'd be hearing how SGi can't build enough of these machines instead of how Apple can't build enough iMacs. Oh well.
Not the midgets, the BIG ones. An RP06 held about 70 MB.
Problem with X is some bad design so that synchronous communication is required to do some things (like select colors!) and some bad programming in toolkits so that synchronous communication is done even when it is unnecessary. In this case pipes don't buy you anything, and if only one command is done between each sync then you pay for the overhead of the buffering code.
If you look at the URL....I didn't write that stuff, it is from the Unix Haters Handbook, which was written by pretty accomplished programmers. The part about X was written by the guy who ported Sim City to unix, so he knows a bit of X, I think. :)
True Type fonts are available for X (that's what I'm typing in.)
Just because you like X doesn't mean it's the fountain of happiness and source of perfection. Read the article. It's well written.
Even if the clipboard is text-only, that doesn't necessarily limit the type of data that you can put on it (or, rather, what it -appears- you can put on it). Note that XPM files are image files, while the file-format is ASCII; PostScript is another textual format that can represent graphics.
Actually..., I may just be really tired, but I'm having difficulty understanding the concept of a `text-only' clipboard--the thought is `a byte is a byte is a byte', and what a byte (or a set of bytes) means is entirely dependant upon the interpreter....
-rozzin.
Well, GNUstep is working on that. From what I've seen, the Display Ghostscript backend is coming along nicely.
Do you want a stable and fast system use BeOS.
Lightning fast GUI not some crappy X.
I mean 15 YEARS and this is all they have
to so fot it?! What are the programmers?!
Retards?! 8-D
Tapes still fill important roles. CD-R burners and media aren't expensive any more, but they're still limited to 650 MB... and in an era where 10+ GB disks are commonplace many datasets have grown far too large to easily put onto a CDs. A prime example is MS Word: 6 CDs. (How much effort did it take to package that?!)
In environments where tape drives are still commonplace for backups, tapes are also useful for transfering large amounts of data. Unfortunately most PC venders long ago stopped offering backup mechanisms due to price pressures.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
X Windows in a nutshell.
Washing-machine sized disk drives with screw
down removable disk packs = RP04 (100 megabytes)
and/or RP06 (200 megabytes).
RP06 specs
Remember that you are required to pay a fee to get a liscense for BeOS. I might be wrong, but it would seem to me that means that BeOS programmers are getting PAID to create/optimize the GUI. As far as I know, X was created by volunteers. (READ: NOT getting paid to create/optimize the GUI)
I can't comment on the quaility of the BeOS GUI, since I haven't used it, but I am considering trying it out.
Even so, I can tell you that on my Linux/Windoze98 dual boot machine, X is a WAAAAAY faster GUI and doesn't slow the machine down so much (a P-II/300 128MB RAM)
=================
darkprophet@I.hate.spam.mngamers.com
It's true that X has a number of very nice features not found elsewhere, but I think the orignal poster was expressing the feeling that "If I don't need it, and I can't get rid of it, it's bloat". This is a core tenant of the Linux philosophy, but it goes out the 'window' as far as X is concerned.
It would be nice to have a display manager that was designed for single user, non-networked workstations. But, 15 years is a long time.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Hehehe, no it was not ... Just like NT wasn't meant for crappy 486 systems ?? So how come people claim that Linux is soo much better OS cause it does better on that kind of systems...
Good idea, except that NeXT, with it's display postscript, never really got much traction in the desktop publishing industry.
As far as I can tell, Display PostScript (on the Next) does virtually everything X does, and it prints 1:1. Too bad it was never more widely/cheaply licenced.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Several things:
It is pretty easy for someone who doesn't understand in the first place to get confused when you start mentioning Xlib as the X library. This gives one the impression of a monolithic library where I call this function and it does that to my screen. I think it bears stressing that Xlib more than anything defines an API to a _protocol_. Furthermore, this protocol is an abstract one...it abstracts away the hardware and the location of the display, and the transport mechanism for talking to that display. This is very important and is key to the longevity of X.
How many are aware that you can use X over a network without TCP/IP? On DEC equipment, we used to use DECnet as the network transport. It is my understanding that serial (and I'm not talking SLIP or PPP) was even useful at one point. IS shops with large numbers of VAXen and Alphas with only DECnet (there *are* reasons for this) still do $SET DISPLAY/CREATE/TRANSPORT=DECNET/NODE=blah
to talk to their Sun machines with DECnet loaded on them! Now you can do this with Linux.
The display server doesn't even have to be a computer in the traditional sense. X terminals were once extremely common (I still prefer them in some ways). To support all of this flexibility, X has to be able to arbitrate what is supported between the display server and the client program, as well as store user preferences and the like. Take a look at things like 'xrdb'. I used to use the X server database in my IBM X terminal to store information that I wanted every machine I was logged into to be able to get to from scripts! I have to think that this is more lightweight than storing such things in an ORB somewhere, and CORBA-enabling every scripting language.
X does so _many_ things, and was _built for networks_. The world is getting more networked all of the time...and faster, too. The promise of X therefore becomes progressively more realistic.
--Rubinstien
Where it is now? You mean with netscape and emacs in swap? :) Just kidding, after I got over 32 megs of RAM I stopped being always on console and use X a lot more now... and it takes up about 13 megs of memory, which is, I'm sure, less than what Windows used (when I had 64, 50 megs was used by Windows NT without any application running...) Well, despite some people's bashing it is a very nice environment, it might could stand a new replacement, but it is still very well implemented and more flexible than any other GUI engine I've seen...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"Mach is the biggest intellectual fraud of the last decade."
"Really, not X Windows?"
"I said 'intellectual'."
-Overhead in Silicon Valley
Windows can't be a virus 'cause a virus actually does something :)
Who am I?
Why am here?
Where is the chocolate?
What is your Slash Rating?
GUI = Grafical user interface...
All it has to do present it's looking a graphical look that is usable and not totally driven by command line input. So therefor X is a GUI.
It might not be the best GUI out there by it's self but that's why there are overlays like KDE and GNOME.
I ate my tag line.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
And I only have an 8MB graphics card, so minus the framebuffer the server is still using 40MB of
RAM.
I'm running Enlightenment and Gnome, but it still seems to be an excessive amount of RAM (to me),
but I'm fairly new to Unix/X and I guess that sort of RAM use could be 'normal' for what I'm
running...
turn off backingstore and save unders! both options in most cases don't improve speed, use up obscene amounts of memory and simply suck (in most cases)
Alright, I know UNIX been around for 28 years, and X has been around for 15. How long was W around? When did GUI's start becoming commonplace on UNIX systems? So 1984 ( the year of my birth [ I'm as old as XWindows ] ) was when the project started, eh? Then W must have done some major sucking in the first few years of its lifetime. Any help will be appriciated! Thank you.
aÍÍ©ÍÌÍ£Ì'̽ͩÌÍzÍYÌÍÌY
At it's heart, X is nothing more than a protocol. There is a wrapper for this protocol, called Xlib.
The basic principle of X is that you have 2d overlapped windows which perform automatic clipping. A window can receive an event, including unmask events and keypress events.
The X protocol (and thus Xlib) has *basic* primitives to create windows, resize and shape them, draw lines and circles, filled areas, drawing text strings, etc.
There are limitations in the protocol, these are being addressed (each major release fixes something big). There is a lot of cruft *around* X (Xt, Motif, PEX) which people often confuse as being a problem with X. The cruft isn't a problem. You don't have to use it.
X itself is damn small, damn fast, damn portable, and works with network transparency. The protocol has been extended in recent years to support direct graphics access, so arguments about X being "too slow for games and multimedia" are unfounded.
Oh yeah, because there's nothing there.
Sometimes you really just have to scrap everything you have and start over from scratch. (Something a certain company in Redmond can take a lesson from). From what I can tell from the docs on the website, it has alot of potential if we can get some more support behind it.
I'm glad I'm not the only person who thinks the current model for X seems a little strange.
It started as a text windowing/multitasking application under DOS. It actually multitasked pretty well - it was good for about 2-3 tasks under DOS (remember most machines had 640k or less in those days). It would even swap a bit - but when it did that, the multitasking model basically collapsed. I would say that in practice it worked better than Windows does today, but that's mainly due to the lack of bloated applications in those days - if you saw swapping, you knew you had to tighten up memory use.
I used it for a dual terminal trouble reporting system for Hughes Aircraft, I think around 1987. It worked great in that application; knowing Hughes, it may still be in use today.
D
----
(I hope I get this right)
Sun first had SunView, which was a window-based
gui that ran on Sun 1s, 2s, and 3s. (I actually
used a Sun 2 once, never a sun 1). It was ok,
but wasn't network transparent. Then Sun came
out with NEWS (Network Extensible Window System)
which involved postscript on the server (display!)
and was pretty nice. At roughly the same time X
came out. Not so much smarts on the server, but
simpler to implement. After some thrashing, sun
begin to provide X. X won.
The same thing happend over again with the X
toolkits. Sun provided OpenView, and (who?)
pushed Motif. OpenView, much easer to program,
lost.
Ok, how badly did I butcher history...
-- cary
Oh, if only X had remained in the labs at MIT where it belongs.
When X killed NeWS, the world of UNIX-based UI was dealt a blow from which it has never recovered.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"Among '80's style window systems" ??
"Still the Best" ???
X is the second worst windowing system ever attempted, and the ones tied for worst are VisiOn, M$ Windoze, and IBM's Presentation Manager.
FWIW, the Mac is an "80's" style window system, too. The only windowing system that exceeded the Mac in useability (both for users and developers) was NeXTStep.
NeWS was wonderful for developers, but unfortunately Sun has no sense of Style, and all the GUI's they shipped on top of NeWS looked like shit. Java is continuing the tradition of ugliness that started with OpenLook.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Slashdot strikes again.
The `I know absolutely nothing about how this thing works', I'm a pointy-haired *idiot* with no technical knowledge whatsoever, but I'll barge in nonetheless and post useless comments making a fool of myself.
Some days, it looks like slashdot is nothing more than a warm, fuzzy feeling, for losers who have nothing to SAY.
X is NOT hardware independent.
a ters/x-windows/disaster.html
As Don Hopkins pointed out in "The Unix-Hater's Handbook":
"X is extremely device dependent, because all X graphics are specified in pixel coordinates. "
More at http://art.net/Studios/Hackers/Hopkins/Don/unix-h
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It was designed to draw graphic primitives on top of which sophisticated window managers and applications could be built. It was not designed to be an end-user product. I say it has succeeded in its goals quite nicely.
I have run the new TNT/TNT2 enhanced X server and it runs remote Mesa/GL apps very well when given enough network bandwidth. X isn't the real bottleneck here, it is the network. Go look at the bandwidth requirements of a modern 3D accelerator. Even PCI slots aren't really fast enough anymore. That makes what I have seen with my own eyes even more remarkable. X is quite flexible and will probably be extended much more in the future before it is replaced; probably with a superset of X itself.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Why does it take up 7-8 MB of memory (right here now) running nothing except wmaker and a rxvt?
It's not running those programs. X is a server. You run applications that communicate with X by a socket or a port. So that communications are minimized, most things (pixmaps for example) are cached on the server side. That would explain some of the memory usage. Some more reasons include a complete protocol including authentication. You perhaps don't care about this, but that's what made X, and that's what allows me to run anything from school on my display at home (yes, I do this very often, and yes, I have a faster than 56kbps connection)
Oh and by the way, what are you comparing X to anyway? Add the memory size of X to that of your favorite free Unix-like kernel, and you're still way under NT's memory usage. And you don't get remote display capabilities from NT out of the box...
I wanna see one of these boxes, they seem so legendary.
...it isn't a problem...sure the box is slow, but that's cause its a compaq....the entire pci and isa busses are on a daughter card and the hard drive has a 76K cache...but it still runs X just fine (and other stuff like netscape and WordPerfect, before someone makes a snide remark about X taking so many resources that nothing else can run ;) )
Who am I?
Why am here?
Where is the chocolate?
What is your Slash Rating?
I guess you could call anything based on more than two standards (DPS and PDF) 'bastardization,' but if it works, that's what matters.
J.
damned vulpine http://sb.drtwister.com/
I'm a big advocate of easy to use desktops but also as a programmer specializing in gui stuff it
pains me that so many of the newer desktop subsystems like Gnome and Kde don't take full advantage of X.
Actually Linux has had a decent desktop for years.
The default configurations that most distros put on fvwm were so ugly that users didn't see that it doesn't have to be this way. Granted, the configs are not easy to customize, but it's worth it. The new fvwm2 is an entirely different creature in looks and just as themeable as some others. Also, AfterStep has been around for years - not as flashy as WMaker perhaps, but more customizable and it has a real pager with desktops and pages and real loadable modules.
One thing that bothers me is that newer window managers and subsystems don't take advantage of the desktop paging system - they just let you switch from one desktop to another. This has a very limiting feeling compared to the expansiveness of multiple desktops with multiple pages - especially for people with smaller monitors. It's like comparing interplanetary travel to warp drive.
X has a lot of features which are seldom used. I wish the newer window managers and sybsystems would take advantage of these before inventing new ones. For example, programs to allow modules to be shared and a more universal configuration system. This would allow for plenty of variety and individuality while also making it easier for most users to feel that they are in control. Some people are already doing this with translators that will convert one desktop menuing system into another. Thanks!
Apple did most of the work to make windowing _practical_. They came up with the mouse-semantics for how things worked, they were the ones who invented _regions_ . :)
*geek block* regions == the irregular shapes of semi-covered windows, and Apple _invented_ methods for only having to refresh that area, not the whole window and then throw away all the hidden parts). Apple brought Quickdraw to the table and had everything going with useful graphics primitives and a whole visual toolbox and the ability to do multiple screens on a virtual 'screen space'. Xerox had _none_ of this- they had the initial spark of inspiration without which Apple would have been pretty lost (Quickdraw without windowing systems? hmmm)
By the way, contextual menus were present in _Smalltalk_ which predates almost anything. It sure predates NeXT, it might predate X: smalltalk is cool and forbiddingly geeky and it's alive and well to this very day. Smalltalk did _everything_ off contextual menus, up to and including the ability to run lines of code you just typed in, simply by picking 'run' from the contextual menu. It was astonishing, especially for its day. The modern Smalltalk is delightfully hackerish and makes me want to learn how to program Smalltalk the language, just because 'living' inside a vast construction of code that you have total access to and can reprogram ON THE FLY seems unutterably cool. I don't actually know if there is anything particularly useful you can do in it, or whether the language you must program with is as approachable as it seems. But it sure _looks_ cool
A couple of years ago, I came up with the idea of "T", both for "text" and coming *before* W (hmm, why did I know about W then???)
:). Essentially, allow the X applications and mouse interface, but translate (and cache) icons to text, and limit positioning to character rather than pixel position.
:)
.12 instead of 1.0, and is grossly out of date). One of the planned toolkits is ncurses, meaning a text interface (of course, equations won't fully display, but it will allow work when only text is available).
:). Currently, most of the developers are tied up with the (purportedly) final release of 1.0.x, and little if any work is occurring on 1.1. But more coders, and particularly documenters, are welcome.
:)
I think it came after using a program whose name I forget that let me have 7 vt100 windows on a mac over a regular dial-up line.
The basic idea was to have a T-window rather than X-window, and to not transmit as much of X as possible, allowing use over slow lines (I was still using a 2400 modem. Come to think of it, every few months I still do
Lacking the time & knolwedge, nothing ever happened with it
While I'm at it, Lyx 1.2 (or 2.0, whatever it ends up) will be toolkit independent (currently it's locked to xforms, and klyx with qt uses
Gratuitious plug: If you're interested in such things, see www.lyx.org, and peek into the "Devlopers only" area (we need a better name
There will not be individual ports to particular tookits, but a toolkit-free core, glue/wrappers/whatevers (not my area).
Mmm, and if anyone wants to take over the mail-merge portion, I'd be happy to pass it on
hawk
In times like today when you can get a 10 gig hard drive for under 200$, who gives a shit if its bloated or not anyways.
My mom worked as the Wire Chief for a large railroad back in the 80's. Her "office" was filled with those big DEC mainframes with the disk-packs that screwed onto the top (bonus question: anyone know how much those things stored?).
Anyway, some time around '82 or so, she brought me to her office to see their new Xerox computers. Her terminal had a big (19"?) greyscale monitor with a full WIMP system. I didn't know much about GUIs at the time, since I didn't get my first Amiga until '85, but I remember that you had could drag icons around using the big, optical mouse, and that it had a really horrible word processor that was a pain in the butt but WYSIWYG nonetheless.
Does anyone know what kind of system that was? I'm sure it was one of the higher-end models, since said railroad spent a lot of money on computer networking systems.
On a side note, it's amusing that my dear ol' mom who can't program her menued VCR still knows more than I do about network upkeep: "What kind of encoding do your T-1's use these days?". She was the first woman Wire Chief in the history of that railroad. Mom, if you're reading this - you're cool.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
It seems this thread is about to turn into one great discussion about GUIs in general so I thought Id throw my take in the mixer aswell..
:).
I am having some difficulty understanding the whole "is X more bloated than Windows" thing.
I have no real understanding of X and/or what it is really, as far as I understand it is just the layer between the windowmanager and the "output?" (graphics card, or whatever), the windowmanager, widget-libraries and things like CORBA has to do all the work. Is this true? Could X more or less be replaced by something lightning fast and very small as long as it can draw stuff on my screen (I DO understand that all the applications and widget-sets would have to be ported/rewritten though)?
Please dont get me wrong, I use X every day and I like it. But I still feel like it really doesnt "do" anything, like it is just something large and memory consuming "blocking the way" to speed.
Could someone please explain to me what X actually does to help a project such as GNOME or KDE out? More than providing the "drivers" and such for the display?
/me is feeling quite lost here
Please dont just flame me, I am not someone you need to fight with, I advocate the use of Linux and X as much as I can, the questions above are simply a product of my ignorance, but I would still like to get an answer to better understand it all.
Well, as they say at the site:
0: In the Latin alphabet, "Y" is the letter following "X".
1: It's not Latin--it's Cyrillic, and it's not pronounced `Why'--it's pronounced `oo'.
-rozzin.
The point so nice, I said it twice. Sorry for the waste of bandwidth.....
(I need a coffee...)
If you believe that the X cut/paste mechanisms only handle text, you are mistaken (you obviously haven't tried copying image regions with gimp).
The X selection mechanism can handle multiple data types, and handles selection conversion (if Netscape has the selection, and you try to paste that text into an xterm, netscape is asked to convert the data to plain text from HTML). It also handles multiple selections (the clipboard and PRIMARY, which is used when you select a bit of text with the mouse).
This is supported in Xlib, and is supported in GTK+ (and hence GNOME). I don't know to what extent Qt supports the X selection.
I think this is one of the additions to X. The old form of clipboard relied on saving the clipboard data to a property on the root window (which was limited to text), which was not nearly as powerful.
XFree86, the X Window System port for PCs, will use a modularised design in version 4, which is due for release later this year. This will allow tuning the X server to low memory environments as well as providing other neat features like run-time patching.
So are any replacements for X close to completion? Even in 1984 the author knew that X was not the ultimate windowing system as was only a start. So why are we still using it today? IMO, it should've been replaced 5-10 years ago, rather than patching more bugs and strange behavior into it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
When Sun migrated from SunView to X in SunOS 4, they developed XView, a GUI toolkit for X which was mostly SunView compatible. Sun Microsystems then stopped active development of XView and became an early member of the open-source community when they released the entire source code and documentation for the XView toolkit under a liberal X-style license. XView was previously proprietary. Today, although XView is mostly defunct, many Linux distributions still have the XView toolkit together with Sun's excellently documented example programs (often in /usr/src/xview). Jazz, the first ever Linux MIDI sequencer, was initially written using XView -- Linux Gazette, Vol.12, 1996. and Jazz v2.6 source code.
The closest successor to the XView style, and arguably the easiest GUI widget set for beginners, is probably EZWGL.
Too many people call X windows X windows for
too many reasons:
1) Its shorter than 'The X Windows System'
2) It annoys X advocates
...
RK05 - 2.5MB, with double density 5MB
RL02 - 5MB, with double density 10MB
Talk about an electron consumer...
This is fromi ndows/disaster.html
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-w
an eloquent description of what's wrong with X.
X-Windows started out as one man's project in an office on the fifth floor of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. A wizardly
hacker, who was familiar with W, a window system written at Stanford University as part of the V project, decided to write a
distributed graphical display server. The idea was to allow a program, called a client, to run on one computer and allow it to display
on another computer that was running a special program called a window server.
...
X was designed to run three programs: xterm, xload, and xclock. (The idea of a window manager was added as an afterthought, and
it shows.) For the first few years of its development at MIT, these were, in fact, the only programs that ran under the window
system. Notice that none of these program have any semblance of a graphical user interface (except xclock), only one of these
programs implements anything in the way of cut-and-paste (and then, only a single data type is supported), and none of them
requires a particularly sophisticated approach to color management. Is it any wonder, then, that these are all areas in which modern
X falls down?
Ten years later, most computers running X run just four programs: xterm, xload, xclock, and a window manager. And most xterm
windows run Emacs! X has to be the most expensive way ever of popping up an Emacs window. It sure would have been much
cheaper and easier to put terminal handling in the kernel where it belongs, rather than forcing people to purchase expensive
bitmapped terminals to run character-based applications. On the other hand, then users wouldn't get all of those ugly fonts. It's a
trade-off.
Ah well, it looks like GNUstep is making some progress, I'll have to have a proper look at that soon and see if the display ghostscript stuff is any good.