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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
Posted by stodge:
15 years, and surely past its sell by date. Must be time for a replacement?
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.
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
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
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
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).
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...
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!"
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....
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)
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.
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
well, I can give you 3 of the 4. Imagine being able to gain compleete control of an NT workstation, mouse included, from any java capable web browser. I've just started using Remotely Anywhere for NT and it works extrememly well to do remote access for the things you described, although it is pretty far from an X window. I get stuck using NT for a few machines at work and have recently come to rely on Remotely Anywhere to do my off site work for the NT boxes, true I can do stuff by command line for some stuff in NT, but I already have a problem trying to use LS in a dos box (doesn't work, I almost set up ls.bat in the windows directory, I'm sure you can figure out what it's function would be) and I'd hate to complicate things between the 2 any more than I already end up doing.
Anyway, I'm definatly not saying that this can replace X in any way, but I just went to step up to the challenge, 3 out of 4 ain't bad is it?
matguy
Net. Admin.
matguy(.com)
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)
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).
"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.
> 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'm running Enlightenment and Gnome, but it still ..."
I think we see the problem here...
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.
Win95 will run in only 4 mb, but you don't get any networking features with that footprint.
-- "I believe the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully." - George W. Bush, 29 September 2000
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.
I think the key item here is the "SX". Windows almost never uses the FPU, but as I understand it, X does quite a bit (especially for fonts, in my experience).
As for the RAM, I totally agree. Back when I got into linux, I readily shelled out the $300 to go from 8 to 16 MB RAM (man, does it hurt to think about that now!) for significant improvements in performance on a 486SX.
On the other hand, I don't know how well Win 95 holds up under low RAM either. While the box I described above dual booted into Win3.1 (which ran fine with 8 MB), a 486SX laptop I have and still use dual boots into Win95. I found that machine pretty useless with 8 MB RAM with Win95 (actually trashed the HD from all the swapping). I run it now at 20 MB (its max). X performance really depends a lot on the WM and the extent to which you have to emulate the FPU.
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
VNC is cool as well; it's cross platform and open source.
http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/
Cheers
Alastair
-- "I believe the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully." - George W. Bush, 29 September 2000
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
win95 will "run" in 4 mb in a restricted mode, not quite safe mode, but almost as bad. I only know because I took out the memory card on my old Toshiba T1900c and started up the computer, it has 4 on board and lo and behold, windows did start up, not happily, but it did start up. I used it for a couple of years through college and now it sits in the corner running Personal Web Server (and getting restarted before the 47 days run out.) I do have to say though, for a win95 install it was extremely stable as I can't recall much of any problems that I would blame the os for, but it sure wasn't zippy. As I recall it took some 3-5 minutes to start up (depending on if it had to log into the network if the net card was in,) I'm sure it takes much less time to get linux and then X up on something like this. Well anyway, I guess there's always room for argument in the computer world, I would fear the alternative.
matguy
Net. Admin.
matguy(.com)
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
I should check that out, Remotely anywhere is some $100, free is much better.
matguy
Net. Admin.
matguy(.com)
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
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!
Well, it all started with Xerox's GUI, which was called Star.
Hints: browse to www.altavista.com and try these keywords "ivan sutherland" "xerox parc" cheers, gbs
Those disk packs could be RL01 & RL02's they are 5 and 10 mb each
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.
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)
and, according to ST TOS, we will still be using them in the 24th century.
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
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.
There is nothing ``pseudo'' about the object-orientedness of Xt and the toolkits built on top of it (Motif and Athena.) The object system they use includes method inheritance (single-inheritance only), runtime typing, and the usual bag of goodies. It's primitive, but it is every bit as object-oriented as anything else that claims that name.
You are right that there is nothing object-oriented about X -- because X is an on-the-wire protocol, and so low level that hardly anybody programs in it directly anyway. That's what toolkits are for.
I suspect that you are laboring under the misapprehension that for something to be ``object oriented'' a so-called ``object-oriented language'' has to be involved. There is no such thing as an ``object-oriented language.'' OO is a programming style, not a syntax. There are some languages that provide useful tools that make an OO style easier to use (like Java, CLOS, and Smalltalk) and there are some languages that provide a huge set of broken and useless tools that get in your way and screw you if you try to use any of them (like C++). But you can write object-oriented code in any language, and you can write assembler in any language too.
This is true. Which is why that's how Xt and Motif and Athena are written, and how one programs in them.
Motif and Athena both suck in their own ways, but the problems have nothing to do with whether they are object-oriented or not. Motif's problems are that it's huge, overly complicated, and insanely buggy. Athena's problems are that it is missing important features, and it has an insanely ugly and hostile look-and-feel. (And both of them use Xrm, the X Resource Manager, which is a completely separate disaster.)
But both (all three) of these toolkits are most assuredly object-oriented. Which just goes to show that being object-oriented doesn't make everything wonderful, like some people seem to assume.
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
Why is it that no one ever gives credit to Berkley Software for GEOS. Yeah it ran on the Commodore 64, but it was a full gui with built in word processor, drawing, and a bunch of other stuff. It never really went too far, but it was great for the time on common hardware (everyone had a c64!)
matguy
Net. Admin.
matguy(.com)
> "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?
search for "Doug Engelbart"
In '84 I was banging away on a Data General Nova and two Eclipses. We had 8 inch floppies and removable Winchester stacks. But then, I was working with gubberment (DOE) money back then and we could pretty much write our own checks for equipment. On the other hand, only a few years earlier, we were still using paper tapes. Ah, the "good ol days".
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.
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.
I had this and I'm so glad you posted cause it made me look at my setup again. Anyway, Redhat or X seem to start by default with the sound card gain all the way up - I just pulled it down using xmixer and everything is fine now.
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.
7-8MB? My X server is using 48MB at the moment, I've seen it get up to 90MB with only a couple of windows open.
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...
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
Washing-machine sized disk drives with screw
down removable disk packs = RP04 (100 megabytes)
and/or RP06 (200 megabytes).
RP06 specs
Buzzing noise from your mouse into your speakers? You most likely have one of the unused mixer inputs turned up by default. Fire up xmixer and turn down what you are not using, like mic, aux, etc...
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.
Kinda like a zipper sound? Usually a "dirty" graphics card. If you get out of X, make sure you unload gpm (so moving your mouse causes no change on your display), and then move your mouse, you should have no extra noises. If you get no zipping noises, it's likely to be the graphics card putting out tons of noise and your audio card not being sufficiently shielded.
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.
How to fix it? If you think about it, there's quite a lot of RF and EM noise going on inside your computer and there's not a whole lot you can do but turn down the volume. As an extreme solution, you might consider looking up one of those projects to "wrap" your card in a kind of tinfoil shield. It's around the web somewhere. Of course, if you're that serious about clean recording you'll probably want to get a soundcard with digital I/O and a DAT to record on. Good luck.
You can find more info on that on my site which
;-)
deals with the history of computing :
http://linux-kheops.com/burpteam/histinfo/
Everything is in French but Babelfish may help
you
To summarize, the idea of the GUI (and it's first
realisation) came from Douglas Engelbart in 1968.
He created the mouse but also demonstrated a GUI
with a WYSIWYG word processor, hypertext system
and videoconferencing ! (yes, in 1968 !!!).
Some people of his team came to Xerox Parc and
created the first computer with a full GUI, the
Xerox Alto, in 1973. Later, Xerox tried to sell
this in 1981 under the name Xerox Star but it
flopped (17000 $ !).
You can find pictures of the Xerox machines and
the Star GUI on my site.
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
Hey that's a great site. Do you have any plans to release an english version as well?
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?
Well (he said, not trying to sound too much like a curmudgeon), it was a different world back then. Tape was about as good as it got for moving data around.
I remember using the VAXstation 100 (aka VS100) mentioned in the announcement. Of course, I was using it in corporate America, so we didn't have X on it -- it had UIS, which was DEC's GUI prior to the X-based DECwindows.
It's a tribute to these folks that X is still chugging along after all these years...
I disagree with that. By not building widgits directly into the X Windowing System, you get the most flexablity posible (you choose what widgits you want to use!)
Bloat is one thing you get with flexablity. Flexablity is a good thing. X Windowing System, is not much more bloated then Windows, so with all of the flexablity it provides it's worth it.
I've already got SaveUnders turned off in Enlightenment, since I had problems with them in WindowMaker when using X11Amp...
I don't know about BackingStore though, is that an Enlightenment option, or something to do with the X Server setup?
(I'll be the first to admit that I'm quite ignorant about most of the works of X).
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
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."
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."
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 dont think the above postings answer your question.
Im having the same problem. But only under windows, when the computer is in an unstable state.
My understanding is PS/2 mouse&keyboard are both controlled by the keyboard controller, which in turn is also used for generating sound through the PC speaker, because of PCs flawed design. Now some piece of Soft- or Hardware f*cks up and couples the keyboard controllers input to the speaker in some way - I dont know what one could do about it.
Except of disconnecting your PC-Speaker. Do you ever need it?
...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 think MECO has a couple. Lotsa other cools stuff, too.
>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.
I've noticed that Windows sound drivers generally make the SC play with an awful lot more noise/static than the equivalent OSS drivers.. could be that static difference making minute noises distinguishable.
If the source of the noise turns out to be coming from governement satelites monitoring you, the tinfoil is a good idea.
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
I haven't seen a real (read: SCSI) 10GB drive for anywhere near $200, but that's another story.
Aside from the obvious storage considerations, bloat almost assuredly means slower execution (unless a substantial portion of the bloat is code that almost never gets executed). Regardless of the recent march of Moore's Law, I don't want software to be bigger and slower than it needs to be.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.
Perhaps you missed the headline. X is fifteen
years old. It runs fine on plenty of different
hardware including a 486-66 that I use to this
day. As early as 1990 I can remem running X
off wintel box displays and under MacOS with a 68030. Realistically, it takes forever for Windows' desktop to start up compared to starting
an X window manager (with the possible exceptions of E or fvwm). And I've seen how long it takes for Windows95 to startup on a P90 with 8MB of RAM -- like 2.5 minutes. Sorry Windows loses on all counts. I'm skeptical you can even start win95 with 4MB ram in a human lifetime.
Also: What happens if you are running an app that requires a 16- or 24-bit display (like Java) on an 8-bit display under Windows? it craps out. What happens under X? It adjusts to the avail colourmap.
Crashing: The only X server I've ever seen crash is my hp300 because its an HPUX X server running on a netBSD kernel and its an X11R5 server trying to communicate with X11R6 clients. Despite all this, it crashes maybe once a week. And I don't blame it considering how badly I'm abusing it. Other than that, my X servers run for months without restarting them.
Also: X runs under basically every variant of Unix that's existed in the past 10 years as well as VMS, MacOS, Windows, OS/2 and hundreds of terminals. And they can all interoperate and display to/from each other. Can any windows-based network transparency solution do that? Nope.
It sounds very much like the X you are talking about is XFree86. Yes that's hard to configure and I can image that craps out on you often. Not because you are stupid or because X is crap but because the XF86 project gets almost no official support from wintel video-card vendors! Imagine if every video card driver submitted an XF86Config file for their card so *you* don't have to worry about the timings? Many of those configuration problems would be history.
Concerning XF86 vs Windows95. In XF86, you can overclock your video card to get higher-than-suggested resolutions. For example, my NVidia driver under win95/nt only supports 1200x1000 resolution. Under XF86 I can milk 1600x1200 out of it. Once again, windows loses.
Perhaps you missed the headline. X is fifteen years old. We've been using X since before 486's existed. It runs fine on plenty of different hardware including a 486-66 that I use to this day. As early as 1990 I can remem running X off wintel box displays and under MacOS with a 68030. Realistically, it takes forever for Windows' desktop to start up compared to starting an X window manager (with the possible exceptions of E or fvwm). And I've seen how long it takes for Windows95 to startup on a P90 with 8MB of RAM -- like 2.5 minutes. Sorry Windows loses on all counts. I'm skeptical you can even start win95 with 4MB ram in a human lifetime.
Also: What happens if you are running an app that requires a 16- or 24-bit display (like Java) on an 8-bit display under Windows? it craps out. What happens under X? It adjusts to the avail colourmap.
Crashing: The only X server I've ever seen crash is my hp300 because its an HPUX X server running on a netBSD kernel and its an X11R5 server trying to communicate with X11R6 clients. Despite all this, it crashes maybe once a week. And I don't blame it considering how badly I'm abusing it. Other than that, my X servers run for months without restarting them.
Also: X runs under basically every variant of Unix that's existed in the past 10 years as well as VMS, MacOS, Windows, OS/2 and hundreds of terminals. And they can all interoperate and display to/from each other. Can any windows-based network transparency solution do that? Nope.
It sounds very much like the X you are talking about is XFree86. Yes that's hard to configure and I can image that craps out on you often. Not because you are stupid or because X is crap but because the XF86 project gets almost no official support from wintel video-card vendors! Imagine if every video card driver submitted an XF86Config file for their card so *you* don't have to worry about the timings? Many of those configuration problems would be history.
Concerning XF86 vs Windows95. In XF86, you can overclock your video card to get higher-than-suggested resolutions. For example, my NVidia driver under win95/nt only supports 1200x1000 resolution. Under XF86 I can milk 1600x1200 out of it. Once again, windows loses.
The point so nice, I said it twice. Sorry for the waste of bandwidth.....
(I need a coffee...)
Is this a VNC-based tool? I tried VNC cuz it sounded like the perfect solution for NT-boxes hobbling your computing environment. I was disappointed in two critical areas.
First, its a remote frame-buffer protocol and it shows. It simply blindly draws what ever is on the NT-box's screen and it does it very slowly (compared to running a remote X client).
Second: from what I've seen, the NT machine is still single user. What I hoped it would allow me to do is log in to a machine that someone else is sitting at and get a windows desktop. Instead what happens is the user and I share the display -- a feature that has very limited use.
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.
Or port mozilla ...
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
Sure X can seem slow in certain scenarios but who is willing to give up the flexibility it offers? At this moment I'm sitting at an old hp300 typing this reply using netscape under KDE (both are running off my laptop upstairs). Why? Cuz my hp300 I don't have KDE or netscape for my hp300 and I hate my laptop's keyboard and its screen is only 8-bit. It drives me _insane_ when I work with wintel suckers who have it hardwired into their brain that you have to *sit* at the keyboard that you are using.
Things X has let me do that no other technology would allow:
Sure X can be improved (what can't) but its an amazing work both in design and in usefulness. Even the code is remarkable. Before C++ was being
used outside of AT&T, moch of X's code was object-oriented...
What amazes me is that MS didn't adopt X when NT came out. It was free and rock solid and would have given them features that NT 5.0 can barely hold a candle to. Then maybe people would stop thinking of X as a Unix thing. I still have people at work who run windows and refer to Reflection/X as a "unix emulator". Um... its not: It's a Windows X server.
Anyone who thinks X is not amazing is just plain
wrong and will the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Che
RK05 - 2.5MB, with double density 5MB
RL02 - 5MB, with double density 10MB
Talk about an electron consumer...
If you want to see pictures...
http://sig11.ideacomputers.com/hot_NeXT_pics/ I would suggest you avoid the main page... I got bored and decided to make it as annoying as possible.
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.