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Xig Ad Campaign Slamming Xfree?
San Mehat wrote in to point us to a full-paged Accelerated-X ad that has taken to some old fashioned mudslinging.
The most incriminating quotes are
"Buckle Up. If you're still using that free X server that came with your linux distribution, well hazardous conditions lie ahead" and
"When the X server 'falls over'--crashes--the entire operating system goes down and usually the user unfairly blames Linux itself'.
What do you think?
i have never had xfree bring down my whole system and the only time when x has ever crashed at all is when i have been messing around trying to make quake3/kingpin/half-life/quake or any sort of 3d games work.
I suspect the problem is that emacs uses its own system for cut and paste that was basically grafted on to the original emacs keyboard commands. That probably doesn't play nice with whatever was built into X.
Someone emailed me suggesting xemacs, which I do in fact use on my SGI workstation in the office, where it works great. But for some reason under Linux it comes up with this totally bizarre and unreadable colour combination (something like black on a dark blue or purple background). Even using xemacs' built-in colour change commands doesn't switch it - I think it might be some kind of X colour thing, but I'll be darned if I know what to do about it. I'm using KDE with SuSE Linux, I think version 6.1.
D
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I used Accel-X some two years ago. I remember having quite a few problems with it, due to some shared libraries it installed over existing ones.
On the other hand I've never had a problem with Xfree. Never crashed on my setup.
OK, I think we all have better things to do than complain about a lame ad. This post should really have been "What's better? Commercial X servers or XFree?" Let's just take a deep breath and realize that what the post is about is just tride and true commercial marketing. I think we're all smart enough to see through this fluff.
"It's a total bitch to configure, but aside from that...."
Try
I'm with you. They could at least charge a reasonable price for it.
That may be true of the older versions of Netscape, but I've found that 4.7 glibc is pretty stable. (Read: I haven't had many problems with it)
This is just silly... Every Linux distribution already comes with XF86 pre-installed, so there is no need for people to "check it out".
This summer I got a new laptop, which neither XFree nor AcceleratedX managed to get X working on properly (despite using the correct settings and the card was said to be supported, a Trident Cygber 9388 I belive). I mailed the AcceleratedX people about it, and they said if I would loan them my laptop for a short while (they pay shipping both ways plus you get to keep some mega protective case) that they would both write the driver and give me a free copy of AcceleratedX. Their responce time was within minutes of me mailing it and they were very kind and informative. I do agree that in most cases you're better off with XFree (especially 4.0 that will have dedicated DGA mode or something similar!) or maybe good old console, but don't give them a bad rep for their customer service. Also, I might add, AcceleratedX has a MUCH MUCH better configuration interface than XFree; I constantly fuck up xf86config and find myself having to run it maybe 4 or 5 times until I have a configuration that is mistake free. I'd also like to point out on the stability issue, XFree crashes on me maybe twice a day; usually I just get so frustrated from near every app crashing nonstop I'll just stick to being a console jockey.
What indeed? My X server crashes occasionally on my laptop (S3 Virge/MX chip), and locks up so tight I can't Ctrl-Alt-ANYTHING -- no killing the server, no switching to a text console, not even ctrl-alt-del to do a controlled shutdown. The only thing I can do is a 0V-suspend, which is useless because when I power it up again X is still locked. I assume the OS is still running, but without a network connection or an external terminal (which are rarely available on planes and trains), what good does that do me?
My only choice is to power it down cold, and wait for fsck to clean up the mess on reboot. So it's functionally equivalent to an OS crash, and that sucks.
Does anyone know a way to kill X when it has seized the keyboard?
I thinnk you misspelled "CD-ROM tray" as "cupholder". :-)
What actually happened that time is that X seemingly froze in the process of switching from a console back into X. Whenever I hit ALT-F7, I would get a blank screen, but the process list said that X was still running. CTRL-ALT-BKSP wouldn't do anything at the blank screen, so all I could really think of to do was kill the processes from a console and restart X; I didn't have to reboot the system entirely.
To really compete in Linux, they must make their source code available. I'm not even saying make it "RMS" free.
With the source(with whatever license), I can:
Quickly fix bugs if I want.
Recompile on whatever OS I have or upgrade to.
Maintain the software if the owning company
goes under.
Without source code, This is very close to Software Renting. Your lease expires whenever you upgrade your OS, or switch hardwarde...
So I'd rather send a check to XFree, than rent software.
You havn't used windows NT on many different systems, have you? :).
I deal with windows NT every day. Bad video drivers exist there just as often as on linux, if not MORE often.
At least with linux you have a hope of recovery if the video fails tho
Yes, there are points where NT has advantages. THis is not one of them.
Commodore 64, Loading up the dance floor!
... X has never crashed Linux on my computer before. I think it may have froze the display once or twice, but it was always accessible via network.
i've also experienced this problem. netscape will lock uness i use the edit/paste command. if i say highlight text on a webpage and then try and paste it to an email (using netscape mail) using the middle mouse button, netscape will often choke.
i think this is problem with netscape however as i have experienced the problem on several different unices and several different X servers.
XFree doesn't support session control in the same way that the new HotDesk does (I think); you can't just "suspend" the X as you can do with screen(1), and then move to another terminal and reattach the suspended X session there.
Have you looked at VNC (Virtual Network Computing, http://www.orl.co.uk/vnc if I recall correctly)? It's GPL'd software, and lets you do what you are looking for - and with many different operating systems, both as servers and as clients.
Just gives me an html error when I try to view it.
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
Actually, the ATI drivers work excellently on my 4MB Rage IIc PCI card. XFree has only crashed once on me, and that seemed to be Netscape's fault. @$#%# Motif!
Visit
I dont know that Accelerated X is any better in terms of overall design. I imagine that they are still running as root and directly talking to the hardware. The only way to get a really stable server in my opinion would be to have the kernel in charge of the video system, just like any other resource. The folks over at GGI are doing this and have an X server that runs on thier video drivers.
That ad is really ugly. It reminds me of a political campaign ad. Even if it were true it would still be inexcusable. I bought a copy of Accel X about a year ago when I bought my laptop. I got a Digital HiNote 2000. It had a chipset that was only experimentally supported by Xfree (C&T 65554). Accel X was easy to install compared to XFree. However, it had a couple of problems. The worst was several fuzzy vertical lines each about ten pixels wide. It was pretty annoying, but The HiNote was not offically supported by Accel X anyway. So, just for the hell of it I tried the XFree server. Guess what. It worked perfectly. I did have to copy the timings out of the Accel X configuration files though. So basically I paid $100 (I think) for timings for my display. Here it is a year later and XFree configuation utilities have far surpassed anything that was available for anything a year ago. Larry
I've been using it since 2.1 and haven't had a problem with any version.
Of course I buy my hardware with XFree86 in mind.
I've use S3 86c801 and S3 Virge cards in the past.
I only use Matrox cards these days (8mb Millennium 2s are cheap and the best 2D cards around!)
I'm running the 3.9.16 "beta" these days.
I think I had X crash once on me and I know it was something I messed up in the process..
Xig is not as good as they think. Accelerated X did *not* work correctly on my laptop -- I got only 15 bit color! -- XFree do a pretty good job, I have never had problems with them.
Back of with that commercial FUD crap!
So after all those posts saying that how Linux is so much more stable then NT, it is now that we can surmise that well, yeah, the box is more stable, but only if you have a second console to be able to telnet into with in the case that X locks up the display...
You can also change to a virtual terminal to kill the X server, provided your keyboard isn't locked out, even if Ctrl-Alt-Backspace doesn't seem to work.
Let's not forget that LOTS of people have networks at home now. Telnetting in isn't impossible...you don't even need a second Linux box. Although, you are correct in stating that if X crashes AND locks out your keyboard AND you can't telnet in, you're pretty well hosed.
However, on my box, which is AMD K62 450 with a Riva 128 board, X quite rarely crashes. I had a few problems in the beginning when I didn't make a big enough swap partition, but after that, its smooth sailing. The only applications that can totally hose X on my system are Netscape and StarOffice, and in that case, I tend to place the blame on those applications, which are severely bloated and buggy.
X doesn't use all the available memory on some video cards
Well, in the case of XFree86, this is mostly due to the fact that good specs aren't available to the writers of the drivers, which often have to reverse engineer things to get a driver, or if there is no specific driver, the user is forced to use the SVGA server, which is pretty generic.
However, to play devil's advocate here, I'll make the case that you should really pick hardware that works well with your chosen platform, not the other way around. Since software is the reason you're using the computer in the first place, the software must dictate what hardware you will run, and not the other way around. Macintosh fans can scream 'til their blue in the face that their hardware platform is somehow "superior" to my generic Intel-based box, but since the software I need doesn't run on Macintoshes, they'll never persuade me to change my hardware.
The same holds true for peripherals. If you're using Linux, you're obviously not going to buy a winmodem. You can't fault Linux for not having winmodem support, you have to say well, since Linux doesn't support winmodems, I simply will choose not to buy one. If you follow the logic, then you'll have to say the same thing about video cards: if Linux (or in this case XFree86 in particular) doesn't support a given video card fully then it becomes obvious that you shouldn't buy that card until such support becomes available.
X is a lot more pickey about what monitor it runs on.
Not at all. If you're monitor isn't directly supported in the config files or by your favorite X configuration utility, you can always program the refresh rates yourself. X will work with ANY monitor your video card supports.
X crashes leave Linux in an unuseable state
Not always. Most of the time, if X crashes, I'm able to fix it.
Kernel prevents X from accessing memory it needs in order to run..
Well, if thats true, then that statement would apply to any X server, not just XFree86. However, a blanket statement such as this one is most certainly false. While I could forsee that in some instances, the kernel might not allow X to allocate memory, if this happened all the time X would be unusable. The fact that the majority of Linux users have no problem using X on standard configurations would seem to point to the contrary.
My journal has hot
Around May 1998 I saw an advertisment for Accelerated-X in LJ, with the same " ... that free X-server that came with your Linux distribution ... " - it waxed lyrical about Accelerated-X providing support for laptop hardware that XFree86 didn't. The whole theme of this one and the one before makes me think of marketing paradigms and mission statements and many companies whose names begin with M.
:wq
Hmm. It's not forbidden to mention other companies when mentioning factual data - say, price comparisons. I haven't seen the ad in question, but that's my guess at it. The law applies (I think) to making comments which are defamatory without basis. It would be fine to say that "AOL are cheaper than Compuserve" but not that "Compuserve are a ripoff". Both say the same thing, of course.
Blah, whatever.
--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me
In the real world, not everybody on the planet who might use an X server is an X server wizard in a position to "contribute effort to the open source component".
I'm not even attempting to imply anything about NT, just that it takes an article like this for Linux users to admit that, yes, there are some things that need to be worked on...
I always read rambles about how Linux is uncrashable compared to NT, etc..., but then reading this one and seeing everyone voice up and say "Well, MY system doesn't work that way" or "When X crashes I'm completely frozen from my system, except i can still telnet into it"
I think a system is only as capable as the person whose responsible to run it... Too often, that tidbit is left out of discussions around here.
First, X hasn't crashed on my computer once.
Second, I have never seen X be picky about monitors (I've set it up on plenty of equipment). All you have to do is tweek the resolution, vert refresh and horizontal sync. The color depth is more or less up to your video card's capabilities. I've seen some rather impressive tools for dealing with the even more advanced settings in X (the SuSE tool, SaX, is incredibly good for doing all this tweeking).
Now, that does sound a bit complex, but when I set up X, I was a relative newbie to the world of refresh rates and screen resolutions. I got X running with the desired settings within minutes of setting out to get it running. That was over a year ago. I'm very sure that SaX has been improved greatly in that year.
Jeff
Ok, my IMPS/2 will jump around on my screen when I switch VT's from console to X, and I get huge numbers of gpm: Error in protocol in my /var/log/messages. What am I doing wrong?
Visit
Metrolink is a much better company. They were one of the first commercial companies releasing Linux software (such as Motif ports), and they regularly contribute to XFree86 and other free software causes. Plus they don't charge astronomical prices for their X server.
I've been on the XFree86 developer's list for quite some time, and apparently this is nothing new.
Basically what's been said on the issue (since it's been brought up several times) is that the guy who started Xig (Thomas Roell I think it was?) is the one who wrote X386, which is the basis for XFree86 today. Apparently he is a bit miffed at the success of the project, and the apparent lack of success in getting ahead of it in his own project.
This generally tends to inflame people who are working on free software that is generally of higher quality than the corresponding commercial software, but they are bashed for their free work. XFree86 4.0 will be worlds above Accel-X in performance, modularity, and features. The thing is, XFree knows this, and so does Xig. The XFree policy is not to sling mud back, and not to post any kind of benchmarks (which often don't make sense anyway), but to simply let the consumer decide what they want to use. We're writing XFree86 for ourselves, and if other people get a good bit of use out of it, then we've more than served our purpose.
The main thing that companies like Xig and Metro-X have above XFree is that they can write proprietary drivers for cards where the manufacturers are too stingy with their specs to let the open source/free software people at it. At least Metro-X knows this, and they contribute code back and forth freely with XFree (including the new module loading system in XFree 4.0, which is pretty awesome).
Don't get all hyped up about this. It's nothing new. It's sad that it's happening in the way it's happening, but just wait for XFree86 4.0 to come out, and there won't be much mud left to sling except that tired old FUD that most people try to use in commercial vs free software. As Linus Torvalds said, "talk is cheap".
Cryptic Allusion - New Mac and Dreamcast Games!
You know this wasn't too bright for the folks over at Xi. Let's look at who would buy this stuff. Anyone dealing with X servers HAS to know quite a bit by the nature of X windows; that has always been the case and from what I've seen in Xfree 4 will continue to remain the case. So let's establish one thing, that anyone who deals with 30 workstations all running X knows their stuff. It's something no amateur could do, period.
Now that we've established that the people setting up UNIX (Or Linux in this case) workstations have to be knowledgable, most of these people will have worked with the various servers that come with Xfree 3.3 or whatever version is public and stable right now. From what I've seen throwing X at numerous S3, Trident, and Cirrus Logic chipsets the SVGA server has performed _flawlessly_, its only flaw being that on the older 2.0.x series it was none too speedy. On 2.2 the speed difference was dramatic enough to make this a non issue; I never got Xfree to crash regardless of the 3 video card manufactures above with 3 or 4 different chipsets from each. So now we've established that yes, Xfree, even if it is fairly large, is fairly stable as well and for standard apps its speed is fine. (My tests were on Pentium/200s, K5/133s, K6/200s, and PII/400s with the above video cards.)
Now where does it leave this ad? You have a company proclaiming that free X servers suck to a bunch of people who know X fairly well and have probably been using free X servers for quite awhile. So where does that leave this ad? I believe it gets demoted to FUD, and we all know what we think of that...
it might get somewhere.
My school put UltraPenguin on all its Javastations. Now you usually have to log in twice from the Javastations because the first time you log in, X goes down and restarts.
Its incredibly annoying, so unless I want to use the school's paper, I usually log in from my Solaris box, do my work, then FTP all the files I want to print back to my system.
P.S. While we're talking about crashing X servers, on x86, XSun (aka OpenWindows) crashes every time if you try to use Window Maker with a background image, if it's not been configured with --disable-shm. There is a patch for Solaris 2.6 that fixes the problem, but none for Solaris 7...
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
was that the retractable cup holder that sez compact disc on the front ?
I've been using Linux for about 4 years now...
:> hehehe... (my personal Favorite)
I've used XFree86 for 98% of that time...
Let's count the ways it's crashed, shall we?
Number 5 BadBlocks on harddrive.. (Ok.. so this froze Linux completely.. so it doesn't really count)
Number 4 CHEAP S3 variant cards... (no big surprise there)
Number 3 Alpha software (yeah.. ok.. sometimes I just can't wait)
Number 2 User stupidity
And the number 1 source of the greatest number of crashes of XFree86??
Gnome/Enlightenment
I've had more crashes in the last 6 months than I've
had in the previous 3 years... 4 of those required
a hard reboot. All the ohters I fixed from telnet.
OTOH... I have an ATI Xpert@Work and tried AX5.x
and had nothing but problems... *shrug*
Maybe it's not supported all that great (RH 6.0)
but it wasn't worth the hassle. Just too wierd.
It hung and crashed quite a bit.
I like Xfree and I'll stick with it... XF86Setup is
killer as well... (I've been using it for what? 4 years now? hehehe)
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
Why didn't you (or did you?) try the tricks on the Linux Laptop pages? There's a solution for the Inspiron 7000 on the LT chip. Of course.. I've got the new media-P (I think they ran out of stock, so mine was a roll over). I still need to play more with xfree to get the tricks listed to work... its not fun getting Caldera at Linux World and than seeing the nice, pretty KDE desktop mangled and unusable.
I've been tempted a few times to go download a demo of AccelX just because I followed the thread on the Inspiron / media-P off their site...
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
I'm keeping my hopes high. I had the opportunity to take in Dirk Hohndel's presentation on XFree86 4.0, and I've since played with the current XFree86 4.0pre source release. It's coming along quite well - I had some minor things to deal with with the tdfx driver, but it's FAST. Fastfastfast. And this isn't a fully accelerated driver yet, either. (The final release will, from my understanding, have ALL drivers that can using the XAA interfaces.) There's no automated config-generation tool yet, but that will (of course) be remedied before the final release as well. And with multihead and GL/DRI support... these are features that XiG charges big bucks for.
Get ready XiG. Your market may begin evaporating sooner than you'd like to believe.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Xconfigurator with redhat is even easier and has autodetect.
Actually, there is one difference between laptops and desktops. The laptop has an LCD, while the desktop uses a CRT. (I know, this is changing, but it is close to a rule right now). CRT's are driven from a card via a DAC (Digitial to Analog Converter). This is told a small number of things - number of lines, number of Pixels per line, refresh rate, H-Blank, V-Blank interval timings and the mode is set.
On LCDs there is only one mode and all the others have to be emulated in a way that doesn't look TOO ugly. No a priori reason why this should be more difficult than programming a DAC, but in practice it seems to be. This may justify a premium, but not 3x.
Yeah, it sucks. And in my humble opinion, they are full of shit. I don't think my X server at home has ever managed to bring down my entire box (and in the very rare cases where I put X on a server, it's never actually configured to display anything locally). But the truth of it is, that's the nature of competition. Let the bastards sling mud all they want, it's not like they're the first to do so. I just hope they don't expect any sympathy when they lose any support from the open source community that they may have had.
Mike Markley - *NIX Sysadmin and all-around geek - finger for PGP key
...would as many people have been so
likely to start using Linux on a regular basis if the only X server available was
commercial and cost at least $100? I know I wouldn't have.
Well I would. In fact I ran Coherent until I heard about Linux. Even then I never really ran X on a regular basis until KDE appeared.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
that's my story
BTW, last post (for now). (I promise, i'll never do it again)
Maybe what he's refering to there is that stock Linux kernels aren't capable of allocating large (like, 4-16 megs) contiguous physical chunks of memory.
X doesn't need this, the gui doesn't need it generally speaking.
It is however pretty helpful for some sorts of video streaming setups.
Currently there's a BigPhysArea patch that allows you to remove a large physical area from the pool that the kernel draws from, which you can then use in a userland driver.
It's certianly possible to advance the kernel to make this sort of thing possible, Linux isn't heavily video-oriented at the moment, But if you want bragging rights, compare X to the windowing system used in BeOS.
The only reason NT's gui gets everything it wants is because it's inserted into the kernel. That's a gargantuan trade-off in terms of robustness, and certianly nothing to brag about.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
I can only recall 1 time in recent years that an X server has crashed on me. I was running MATLAB with an early KDE, and a certain action in MATLAB would take X down. This was very repeatable. (I wish I could say the same thing everytime NT has crashed on me -- the NT crashes can never be repeated and take NT down for the count.) In this case it would not crash Linux, just throw you out of X. Anyway, after upgrading to the latest rev of KDE at the time, it was fixed, and has never happened again.
I have had great success and stability with the various XFree servers I have used (S3V, SVGA, and Mach64). And if I did have problems, I would expect them to be resolved in short order).
Now keeping Netscape from crashing, that is another story. Of course, it has never brought down X on me.
Compared to Windows, XFree's mouse cursor is unresponsive. You can just feel the difference when you use each for a period of time.
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I can consistently crash my Linux box by running Netscape and checking my IMAP mailbox. I can't Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, Alt-Fx or even telnet in from another machine on the subnet. Nothing but the Microsoft shuffle (pressing Reset) can bring it back. I don't blame XFree86 or Linux, this is definitely a Netscape problem.
Free Mac Mini. Yes, I'm
The goal is to have the kernel protect the display resources the same way it protects the disk, yet allow display drivers to work "under" than in user-space.
Wade.
Now I can't test this with AccelX, but the point being, that I get respectable performance in XFree86 without using any commercial software. And it's only crashed once - and I'm certain that that's not Linux's fault (It screwed up my card state so that even on the console it looked funny - characters were wrong, but there. I had to do a "blind reboot" to fix the problem).
Now, if I could just get rid of all of my commercial software...
Visit
Yes , most graphics card are supported under XFree but there is also issue of the quality of support. From my experience, I can tell you, AceelX server are always faster, sometimes bit more, sometimes a lot more, but consistently outperform XFree.
That's good enough reason for me.
Look in past issues of Linux Journal, you'll see many similar ads from XiG trashing XFree.
Go to http://images.linux.com/xi_ad/ again, look at "entire.jpg" - the third image file of the page, - and now look carefully at the bottom right hand corner of your screen - that is, the lower LEFT hand corner of the "entire.jpg" image, - do you see a notebook?
Now, look at the image on the notebook's screen.
Don't you think the road-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-with-blue-sky-and-w
Is this a co-incidence, or is it a "planned" thing?
Even the "white-cloud-with-blue-sky-background" thing looks remarably similar with the logo of a certain OS many of us rather forget?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
When I first got my Dell Inspiron 7000 XFree didn't support the ATI Rage Pro LT chipset correctly, so I had to resort to trying out AccelX for laptops. While the performance seemed okay, I wasn't very happy with having a closed source commercial product running on my operating system.
Anyway, about 1 month later XFree 3.3.5 came out that had correct support for my laptop! I was only TOO happy to get rid of the AccelX server and go back to the free world. I thought I'd be loosing performance but I didn't notice anything. And VMware started working correctly again too !
I really think it's a shame XIG had to go that way, because I thought they had a niche that was acceptable, but trying to "feed" off XFree is just pushing it too far.
Go XFree !
In the year that I've been using Linux, I've found XFree86 to be quite reliable. It's not perfect, but it's certainly preferable to any version of Windows. One _really_ annoying thing is when xfs isn't running and the X server locks up the console because it crashed and then is respawned by init. The only way to deal with that is to go in be telnet and then reboot in single user mode. I wish that the X server would just halt, and not exit, so that it would be possible to switch VC's and entera different runlevel without rebooting.
If you had bought a B&W G3, your cup holder would have come with a ingenious blue brace, of course the cup holder itself is a little high for my liking and I'm not sure why they changed manufacturers, the cup holder itself isn't much different than the one made by CD, although my friend told me that DVD is the wave of the future so they must be doing something right.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
Don't count on it. AccellX has a great product, much better than XFree. I paid $ 100 and I am extremely happy with AccelX 5.
( one thing that sucks is that I need to shell out another 200 for laptop as XFree (trident) on ThinkPad is almost unusable , so slow)
Well, it looks like better half of original XFree project ended up in XiG. How else would you explain difference in quality (specially speed !!)
between two products.
Running RedHat 6.0 , KDE and netscape 4.08 and 4.61 I have completely frozen Linux ( no virtual terminals , no keyboard or mouse response , nothing ) by viewing this page :
http://www.ferretsfirst.com/fadop/
I have never tried to fix it across a network .
I have heard that the same can be said of netscape
4.7
Wow... I need to find my way back to a high school science/math department fast... Scientific notation errors are about as embarassing as they get... :)
Yet another reason why [L]GPL rocks, for projects and businesses alike.. the business contributes to the actual project, can sell it SUPPORT/SERVICE, not the product, and the project doesn't ever get these kind of problems.
Previous post of mine, which I don't feel like pasting
-- d'arcy poirot
So after all those posts saying that how Linux is so much more stable then NT, it is now that we can surmise that well, yeah, the box is more stable, but only if you have a second console to be able to telnet into with in the case that X locks up the display...
Really! Just a little while ago (in the Gartner thread) there were all these posts saying things like: "Linux kicks NT's as in terms of stability", "Linux can dominate the desktop"... Face it, if X crashes, the system may as well be crashed if you're an end user.
Lets' just continue the list a little more, shall we?
X doesn't use all the available memory on some video cards.
X is a lot more pickey about what monitor it runs on.
X crashes leave Linux in an unuseable state
Kernel prevents X from accessing memory it needs in order to run...
And you wonder why Gartner says that Linux isn't ready for the desktop? Joe user (and me) doesn't want to worry about a kernel not wanting to give my video card the memory it needs to run. I just want to plug it in, maybe load some drivers and have it work...
-----------------
Go ahead, moderate me down... I've got karma to burn!
I've had XFree86 crash exactly once, and that was immediately preeceded by a Netscape crash (it could have been a coincidence). The keyb controller got hammered, and I couldn't ctrl-alt-backspace to kill the server.
I'll keep XFree86, thanks, but I've got to get a better browser some day soon.
TedC
Diamond SpeedStarA50 8MB 350 MHz
Accelerated-X v5 9.7 12.7 16.9 N/A
XF_SVGA 3.3.3.1 -0- -0- -0- N/A
NOTES: Tested Apr 99. XFree supports this chipset, but does not support this card, XF86_SVGA will not run with this card.
This is what i found on their website.
I have this card!
I bought SuSe 6.1 on 1th april with FX86 3.3.3, and it works perfectly with my card, so they're plain lying!
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
... XiG is free, as a corporation in a democracy, to do whatever it likes with its advertising budget. Likewise, we as consumers in a democratic capitalist system, may decide to purchase their software (or not) based on its merits.
;)
If the slags on XFree are without merit, then we'll know soon enough. If XFree can use some improvement (which it can, in terms of utilizing vendor-specific acceleration HW to its fullest), let's see the commercial market spur the free product!
I've never used XiG, though I considered it for the brief moment when they were the only X server that covered the NeoMagic laptop chipset. Once that feature got rolled into XFree, I haven't needed the performance of the accelerated drivers, and I have never had a problem with stability on XFree. EVER. (though finding the right damn modelines can be a chore
I can see ads like this one cutting into Linux acceptance. Basically this is an ad for a Linux product saying that the free stuff ain't worth it. The average non-Linux user is going to get from it that inorder to have a stable graphics system on Linux, you have to pay. In the minds of many, they will goon to think that you have to pay for anything good on linux and will become disillusioned with Linux advocates. They will refer to the ad as "proof" that you have to pay to run Linux.
I certainly hope that we all take this as a lesson of what not to do.
-no broken link
You might also want to try Postilion, a client derived from TkRat (although I've always had better luck with TkRat myself).
There have been times that I have gotten fed up with problems with XFree86, and downloaded trials of Accel-X, goign back to 2.1 and most recently with 4.x or 5 (I don't remember) for a laptop.
The first was a problem on an old S3_911 card, that would occasionally crash X, and with the old version of XiG (this was in 1995) it took out the whole machine. I went back and tolerated the smaller XFree problems.
There have been other instances I don't remember clearly, but recently with a Laptop using a CL 7548. I had wierd problems with XFree, and X-accell just took the machine out. Needless to say I have never purchased the non demo of their product. If it crashes in 10 minutes, I am not going to buy it.
On a side note, I have always been very happy with XFree's quick resolution of these problems. My current computers, my desktop with a Matrox Millinium 2, and my Laptop with a Neomagic, seem to work great on XFree, and I have no desire to introduce instablity in machines that haven't ever crashed with the current versions of the software.
I hope someone at Xig is reading this. Mabey they will cut the FUD.
Personally, although I was able to get greater color depths with Accelerated-X, I could never get the resolutions to which I've become accustomed to in XFree and windows. Accelerated-X claimed my hardware was not capable of 1600x1200 at any refresh rate or color depth, yet it clearly is, since that's the resolution I have running on XFree as I type this.
The X server can't actually cause a kernel panic, but it does take control of the mouse and the keyboard. If it crashes badly enough, it can effectively cut off the console. If the machine is networked, you could go to another machine on the network, telnet in, and reboot. If not, you're pretty much forced to hit the 'ol reset button. In the ~3 years I have used XFree86 on Linux, I have had this happen maybe 3 times. I've found that the trick is to watch the memory footprint of X. When it gets too huge, restart X. I wind up doing this once every week or two.
-- THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK -- --
With the exception of the voodoo problems and the netscape problems, none of the crashes ever affected the operating system proper (With the vooodoo issues I could have tenetted in and rebooted remotely if I'd had the resources.) It either goes back to the command line or back to XDM depending on where I started X from on that particular system.
I would like to note for the record here that all the worst lockups on my system were the result of commercial software. It is my experience that commerical software can not match open source software for quality and reliability (And I've seen the guts of a lot of proprietary commercial software and worked on a lot of it myself.) A good portion of this problem is a simple allocation of resources. How many programmers does Accelerated X have working on any given X server. How many can Xfree86 marshall? If worse comes to worse you can always hack your X server yourself if you're using an open source product.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Nod. Those apps make a lot of use of MIT shared memory, and AccelX has often in the past had a broken MITSHM implementation. (Doesn't seem like it'd be so hard... the official X11 source tree has all the code right there, but...) Of course, I still don't know about their DGA situation - do they have DGA at all? If so, are they making ANY attempt to be compatible with XFree86? (Yes, XiG, XFree86 is STILL the setter-of-standards.)
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
As for URLs, every time I click on them in tkrat, it fires up netscape.
Don't even get me started on html mail ... if your job requires html mail, I feel sorry for you.
I guess the difference between you and me is that I want a mail client that can read mail, and you want something that looks pretty and can handle attachments, html, and other things not generally meant to be done with email. Maybe actually reading mail is a secondary priority for you, considering how badly Netscape Messenger crashes on you all the time.
What - TELNET in?!?
Just download KReset and you have a nice push-button interface for resetting stuck display servers. You can even STORE your ROOT login password in the application so grandmama can fix her display without calling you at 3am.
This would be MUCK more useful than say KTop, a graphical interface to the awkward and very DOS-like "top" command. I was very saddened when I discovered there was no homepage for Ktop... [sniff!].
KIDDING folks.. put down the knife Pitr.. :)
The difference is that in Linux, when the graphics subsystem crashes, you at least have the option of killing the X server over the network. With NT, if the graphics subsystem crashes (and don't tell me it never crashes), you're looking at a blue screen.
The ability to recover via network when the graphics subsystem crashes is a feature that is useful and absent in Windows NT. It's ironic that you slam X crashes as leaving a Linux system unusable, when in reality the situation is exactly opposite of what you describe. Between Linux and Windows, the only OS that is left unusable by a graphics system crash is Windows, not Linux.
My wheel mouse works flawlessly... and as for OpenGL... perhaps you should read the part that says you have to buy the OpenGL libraries...
Although, I think they should be included with AccelX... paying $100 for it was enough, add in the price of the OGL libs ($150 i think?) and its way over priced... I think Xig needs to realize charging $100 for AccelX alone is pretty bad when you can find copies of Win9x floating around for the same price... perhaps not legitimate... but the home user really doesn't CARE who supplies them with the CD... just that they get it.
http://www.schizo.com/
Who are these guys? One would think that they are from the Windows camp with statements like these. Was it the suits that said this crap, or the developers?
Oh well, when you get down to it, X stability is a given. To think that it could ever be up for some sort of questioning is unbelievable by itself.
BDKR
Funny, I have had X-free crash on me about twice in six months. I wonder if the XiG driver allows you to ctrl+alt+bckspce? I have never had my Linux box freeze because of the Xserver. Maybe I am just lucky. Kinda sad to know that FUD is not just a Micro$haft ploy :o(
"One world, One people, One Operating system" Micro$haft Ad "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer" Crazed European Dictator
Probably the easiest way to gain a similar effect is to use a graphics card that can support hardware overlays. That way you can have both 8bpp applications (using 255 colors) and 24bpp applications. Use the 8bpp overlay planes as a default and your WM and other simple apps will save system memory and don't interfere with the separate 24bpp planes at all.
'ps', 'top' and most other process listing utilities do not seperate system memory and driver memory use. Many (most) graphics chips are now used with memory mapping. This can result in the X Server memory mapping more memory than exists in the system. I've seen systems where the X Server uses 150% of available memory and apps use the other 80% ;-) That's more of a defect in process listing tools than in the X Server or the X Window System.
Accelerated-X should be fine with the i740 in 24bpp color depth, both in the normal AGP and in the StarFighter PCI version. That's not an X failure or a Linux failure...
Cheers, JeremyC.
Jeremy Chatfield, Technical Evangelist, Xi Graphics.
It was nice, but XFree86 seems to have all the nice toys these days. Can't wait until 4.0!! Can AccelX keep up? I'd use AccelX if there was no hope that XFree86 would get drivers for a particular card.
You might want to check before spewing bullshit next time, English Nazi.
--- Dirtside
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
We've seen that one over here, without help fo the government :)
:) for a couple of months, and then go away--having made a killing, thanks to the notoriety.
Every couple of years, usually in California, someone opens a topless donut store. Not the customers, but topless waitresses. Yes, it's a dumb idea, and not viable. Left to themselves, they'd be gone within a month.
But what happens, which they *count on* before opening, is that NOW will come picket, and local news will cover the pickets. They sell a lot of donuts (probably very bad donuts
I should know - not only did I build the pages, I also experienced the crash that (ultimately) required me to wipe out and reinstall Linux (Caldera OpenLinux 2.2).
Netscape 4.61 -- The program itself freezes, but X and KDE are still responsive, allowing me to kill it.
Netscape 4.7 -- Totally froze the whole system. Keyboard and mouse froze. Forced to reboot. Linux was *not* happy with my decision, and locked up again on restart.
If you use 4.7 *Don't go there*!!! (Unless you're incredibly brave)
MP
This is nothing new. About a year ago a huge flamewar erupted in comp.os.linux.x about XFree 4.0, the participents included Jeremy Chatfield and Thomas Roell of Xig (me too). It was all extremely ugly and distasteful. I lost all respect for Xig after this, they acted in a very unprofessional manner (and I wasn't too proud of my own actions, but I wasn't representing a company). The thread is here.
Apologies if this doesn't work right, dejanews has sucked ever since they changed their interface.Just do a search of "XFree86 4.0
Q.
The 4.61 crash sounds like a netscape bug. The 4.7 crash sounds like an X Server crash. Most X Server crashes are h/w dependent. Usually, a bug that can kill or disrupt one X Server on one h/w platform is completely irrelevant to a different X Server and graphics chip. It may not even affect a different revision of the same graphics board (e.g. different memory type or different graphics chip revision).
Cheers, JeremyC.
Jeremy Chatfield, Technical Evangelist, Xi Graphics.
They've been running these ads in LJ for quite a while... Can't say I like the way they use "free" like a dirty word though. :P
--
All Glory To The Hypnotoad!
"Accelerated-X is like a fresh set of tires on brand-new blacktop."
That statement becomes all the more funny when you realize that in real life if you start to get too jiggy with new tires on fresh blacktop you'll soon end up in a ditch. Zero traction. Believe me, I watched my roommate NAIL his brand new '99 Subaru Legacy GT into a median due to excatly those conditions...
Well, I'd love to say that I've never seen X crash, but the unforutnate truth is that it crashed on me a couple of times (actually, it was an old version of KWM that crashed - and it was reproducable... but it only ever happened with an old S3 video card.) And yes, it was a complete lock-up.. no network or anything else.
Also, my computer has crashed a few times in Linux; always with NFS (if I don't use NFS, it works 100%)
Netscape (under Linux) has crashed a total of 4 times (I think - might be only 3..) in 18 months.
Other than that, I've never experienced a single crash, or lockup, or failure (and this is on 18 boxes.)
I'd say that's pretty damn stable.
I have seen accelX take down my computer before though, I was trying it out with my brand-spanking-new diamond Stealth 3200, I used the wrong settings, and poof it brought Linux down...my fault of course, but it could of at least crashed nicely...
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
What you describe sounds exactly like an X Server crash, probably caused by an incorrect configuration or because the hardware is more recent than the X Server support. Cheers, JeremyC.
Jeremy Chatfield, Technical Evangelist, Xi Graphics.
The XFree project's goal is to produce "a freely redistributable implementation of the X Window System that runs on UNIX(R) and UNIX-like operating systems (and OS/2)."
There is also a port now to Windows NT running Interix, although I haven't tried building or running it.
By the way, has anyone figured out what's different between 4.6 and 4.7? Besides the "Shop" button, that is. ALL the bugs I found in 4.6 are still in 4.7. What the hell was the point of that release?
4.7 seems to be more stable on my system. It still crashes intermittently, and I've never figured out why, but it seems to do so less frequently. As far as new features, I don't know of any. (no, I don't count an extra button on the toolbar and a few extra links from the 'Window' menu features)
When you're talking about X crashes, btw, it matters whether you're talking about an end user or a guru. To an end user, an X crash is just as bad as a Losedows crash -- it requires a reboot. To the guru, the crash is simply an inconvenience which rarely does any damage. IE, the important services are still running, just have to open all those shell windows again.
I don't remember who stated that an X crash leaves Linux in an unusable state, but it's completely false. At worst, you may have to telnet in and kill running X servers, but it doesn't leave anything unusable. Rebooting won't help any, at least.
$ more ~/.sig
********
I was under the impression that the X server was seperate from the operating system itself. So when X dies or anything, the system continues to run. And X can just be restarted or the offending processes killed. The description seems a little misleading, "the entire operating system goes down and the user unfairly blames Linux." I think someone is just trying to jump on the linux bandwagon by selling replacement tools that fix nonexistent problems.
:)
That's what my experience has been.
And I think I'm first.
kaniff -- Ralph Hart Jr
X crashes a lot on me. OK, It's probably the crappy app I programmed myself, with the huge memoryleak, but...
I couldn't get out with CTRL-ALT-F1, CTRL-ALT-BS or sysrq-K or R. Logging in remote said X did die, but the screen still showed my frozen desktop. sysrq-(nice sequence to sync,unmount,reboot) worked, tho, but when I can't restart X anymore, that's about the same as "bring Linux down" for me.
Still, it was my own crappy X app, but that did bring down my X server. Too bad an app can bring down the Xserver
--
AcceleratedX does support wheeled mice, and there is an OpenGL library available - which costs extra. It's also easy to make it use a generic monitor. This price is rather high, though - and far too high if you include OpenGL. A good thing about the upcoming XFree is that I believe Xi will have to lower their price on the X/OpenGL as they need to make it one package. PS: I first bought for my old I128. It crashed the XFree server frequently, as well as being real slow - even after it got acceleration support. With AcceleratedX, it was very speedy. With my new Riva TNT, XFree is fast enough and stable enough.
When was the last time your XFree86 crashed? When was the last time your computer crashed, and you blamed it on Linux?
I've had Gnome and Enlightenment crash on me plenty of times (hmm... beta software and beta software, what a great choice for the default setup on RedHat), so I switched to wmx and now the only thing that crashes is Netscape (and my own stuff while under development).
Yeah, you need a commercial quality X server about as much as you need a commercial quality OS.
The Accelerated-X server's involvement in cut-and-paste is that it accepts requests from X clients to set and get various properties on windows, and the like; the problem you're having is probably a problem with what either Emacs or Netscape is doing, not with what the X server is doing.
Maybe those applications are dynamically-linked with toolkit libraries that are doing the X requests to do the cut-and-paste operations, and maybe, if you also use XiG's versions of the client libraries, it'll work better (or if you relink a statically-linked Emacs with those libraries), but I wouldn't count on it.
I just tried it with GNU Emacs 19.34.3 and Netscape Communicator 4.02 on Solaris 2.5.1 (displaying on Exceed on an NT box); paste-current-selection (i.e., select something in the GNU Emacs window, and hit the middle mouse button in the Netscape window) worked, but true copy-and-paste (select something in the GNU Emacs window, use the "Edit/Copy" menu item in Emacs, go to the Netscape window, select the "Location" box, and try to use "Edit/Paste") didn't - the "Edit" menu had "Paste" grayed out. (I did copy-and-paste rather than cut-and-paste because I ran Emacs on a file to which I didn't have write access; both of them should use the CLIPBOARD X selection in order to Play Well With Others.)
What really amuses me is everyone saying that "Linux never crashes" and "Linux is stable", and claiming that NT crashes all the time, when in fact it's the same scenario as when the NT GUI goes down; the kernel is still going, it's just that you can't do anything from the GUI.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
I think my point here is that the /. crowd wasn't their target anyway. They're looking to snag corporate buyers who want a product that they can sell their boses on. This isn't about quality - it's about viability. And, unfortunately, the two just don't go hand in hand in the corporate world.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
No offense to the XF86 guys, since I've been using their product since ..well forever (7 years now? wow.). I have seen recent releases that just don't work with the hardware I had (an S3V/VX and CT69000 come to mind). Earlier releases worked just fine. As the later releases came out, the S3V quit working with the release bundled with RedHat 6.0, and the CT69000 quit working with the 6.1 release. I did get the CT69000 working, but not without tuning off BitBlt, forcing me to modify the XF86config file. Both situations would cause my Linux box to hang hard (requiring me to hit the reset switch). I wound up replacing the S3V with a G400MAX (get one now!).
That being said, Xig is not really playing nice. There are certainly other things that differentiate Xig with the standard XF86 product. Performance, multi-head (now), and bleeding-edge cards.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
- The textarea widget leaks up memory like no one's business. If you're going to leave netscape open for a while, for god's sake don't leave it displaying a textarea widget!
- Intermittently, Messenger (the only semi-functional IMAP client I've found for linux btw, for X) will go into some kind of loop, where it cycles using 100% of the processor, then 0%, etc about once per second. It also fails to get mail, frequently, stalls on IMAP connects, etc etc. Basically it needs to be restarted about every fifth time I check for mail.
I'm getting really sick of netscape, myself. I wish there was another option.By the way, has anyone figured out what's different between 4.6 and 4.7? Besides the "Shop" button, that is. ALL the bugs I found in 4.6 are still in 4.7. What the hell was the point of that release?
----
We all take pink lemonade for granted.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
Evil Empire? Oh please ;) Linux advocates have been "trouncing" Windows for years, who exactly is the great shining hero in this scenario? Linux? Give me a break.
Do they help? Umm, not really. If you get the code wrong, it goes wrong as easily in the kernel as in user space.
What does help? Testing, testing, testing... Most of the bugs we find aren't caused by X Server design, but by graphics chip changes or misleading statements in databooks and sometimes by human error (typographic errors in coding).
Every Accelerated-X driver module is subjected to many automated tests and several types of human testing. We use things like the freely available X Test Suite and our own tools. We also monitor an automated problem reporting mail address. Accelerated-X has a feature that when it crashes, most of the time it will generate a human readable crash dump and email it. That finds some failures that we miss in the standard testing, or identifies new hardware variants that crash with the normal code.
Cheers, JeremyC.
Jeremy Chatfield, Technical Evangelist, Xi Graphics.
I have not been very happy with RedHat 6.0. I don't know if this has to do with X or not, but my RedHat workstation at work locks up completely EVERY night. I had even taken it off the wire to see if it was because of an attack from outside. When she dies, she dies hard and I cannot connect to her from another machine. The problem could also be with the SMP support?? As soon as glibc 2.1 is included with the stable version of Debian, I am switching over. I had another Debian system here once before, that had long uptimes (months) for a workstation. She never broke, and X never crashed!
Odd, whenever an NT box I have the misfortune to need BSODs out, I seem to lose drives mapped to it, and the webserver stops responding. I wasn't aware those were normally considered parts of the GUI.....
--
-=DaveHowe=-
To make xdm start, you just need to tell it to not look for a local XServer configuration. To do this, comment out the line in /etc/X11/xdm/xdm.options that says "check-local-xserver" and it should start up just fine. You also need to add an antry to /etc/X11/xdm/XServers telling it where to find your AccelX binary, something like:
:0 local /usr/local/bin/XAccel :0 vt9 -bpp 16
craig
I finally found out what was wrong: The frequencies for the 'monitor' were causing problems with the LCD display that's hooked to the server. So I booted in NT, copied the freq's from the Info the On Screen Display gave me and used them to set up X and voila, it worked!
What makes a graphics card so different from any other card in your machine? Nobody said you had to stuff the X server into the kernel. All you really need is the code that talks to the hardware.
After 2 or 3 years of dealing with Linux systems in whatever spare time I can muster, I still consider myself a newbie. A lot of X is still a mystery to me, as is much of the system itself.
Still, I have never had a problem with X, and never had a problem with it crashing. From the first time I installed RedHat 4.2, X has *always* stood up and saluted....
Well...
:)
;-)
In my observations Netscape's development went severely downhill after release 4.05.
Don't get me wrong, I used to be a member of DevEdge and loved Netscape.
I think as soon as they started integrating Netcenter, what's related, and other nonsense the number of problems increased.
What really pissed me off is that I had to edit prefs.js to turn off the Netcenter crap. Then again, AOL purchased them, what could you expect? User-friendly way to turn off annoyances?
I would advise using Netscape's FTP archive for previously released versions and download release 3.04gold. That's probably the most stable release they ever had with no Netcenter nonsense and quality engineering.
I have a DevEdge CD with all releases of Netscape up to 4.5 for all platforms, and this is the most stable version.
--
Leonid S. Knyshov
Network Administrator
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
You mean, two competing products are.... competing????
Here is the text of the gigantic image:
Bumpty Ride
Buckle up. If you're still using that "free" X server that came with your Linux distribution, well, hazardous conditions lie ahead.
The X Server is the graphics sub-system in a Linux or UNIX installation. It is more than twice the size of the Linux kernel and much, much busier. Critical communications, fonts, drawing, windowing, mouse, keyboard, memory functions, and more all depend on the X server.
When the X server "falls over" - crashes - the entire operating system goes down. And usually, the user unfairly blames Linux itself.
To make your graphical Linux all that it can be, you need a commercial quaklity X server that's proven itself in thousands of mission-critical applications. An X server that delivers the full power of your graphics hardware to your LCD or monitor in the form of crisp, clean, and fast images. For all that, you need Accelerated-X.
Unmatched stability. Lightning-fast graphics. Superior performance. You'll find accelerated-X is like a fresh set of tires on brand-new blacktop. Want a test drive? Steer your browser to our website.
-konstant
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
>I don't remember who stated that an X crash leaves Linux in an unusable state, but it's completely false
You're dead wrong. You assume that the X hot keys are still working, that the machine is networked, or that you have a 2.2 kernel with the sysrq keys compiled in & sysrq K actually manages to get X unstuck.
None of these are necessarily true. In particular, it's absurd to say "well, just buy two computers, so when X dies you can telnet in from the other one and fix it!" yeah, right. X shouldn't leave the machine stuck in a state where you *need another machine* to fix it.
I just ran another X hanging program (gnuplot a very large data file). When it locks, the ctrl-alt keys are *not* working. I do have sysrq, and sysrq K appears to have killed X (assuming it didn't die on its own) & since I have xdm running it was respawned.
However the ctrl-alt keys still don't work & in fact lock up X, now. ctrl-alt-f1 freezes the display. and following this sysrq K no longer works.
only sol'n is reboot or log in remotely (since i'm at work & have a dozen machines on the network). killing X via remote login, or going to run level 3 still doesn't get the consoles back. hot keys still don't work.
this is some pretty serious pathology for something as simple as "plot 'data'".
After reading that ad, I feel more devoted to XFree86 than I ever was. Now I'm interested in even contributing to the project.
I'm sure others feel the same. Good move, XiG. Really.
Not to say that it's wrong of them to compete or anything, they must be facing things similar to what BSDi is up against. But what a dumb thing to do.
To add my chips to the pile. I've never ever had XFree86 -crash- on me. At work, home, on any machine, be it FreeBSD or Linux.
Metrolink has the idea.
Xi Graphics doesn't.
Yeah, but if you think about it, with linux's current popularity, there are users who couldn't give two Sh*ts about the ethics and values of open source. This is most likely the market they are targeting, the market that doesn't know any better.
I'm supposed to be working right now.
Working with Linux doesn't automatically confer sainthood on one. There are mud-slingers the world over; OSS is no exception.
However, it helps no-one; least of all the makers of this fine ad. In OSS user goodwill is more important than other branches of software. If MS piss off the user base (and when haven't they?) the users grumble but continue use. With Linux, they're outta there like a rat out of an aqueduct.
or maybe not. I've NEVER had X crash on me, it was always a window manager problem.
Slamming free software is like badmouthing Goodwill or Salvation Army.
---- I'm going to lead you kicking and screaming, giggling and laughing into the future.
if it works for you, use it. I personally have been burned in the past by poor support by vendors for binary releases.
In the ideal world, you'd contribute effort to the open source component, to make it work as well as Xaccel, instead of paying money to a bunch of greedy capitalists.
I think I just spurted Mountain Dew out of both nostrils or something.
That was great.
-Brent--
$100 seems like a very reasonable price to me.
Huh. Well, I guess it's just me then! (And no, this isn't a nice way to get hits - I lol'd when I read that!)
... but that was/is a driver problem. I'm currently working on installing SuSE 6.2 on an IBM Netfinity 3000 and when I select S3 Trio3D as card , which is what is supposed to sit in that machine, and then fire up X it hangs completely. (Neither CTRL+Backspace nor CTRL+ALT+DEL do anything)
;)
But I guess that's more the driver than X itself. At least I hope so
In my opinion, the major advantage Xi Graphics, Inc. has over the Free Software Community is their willingness to sign non-disclosure agreements which, though they effectively tie the product to a closed-source model, allow for a fuller featured and more hardware-specific X server, not a more stable X server.
Yes: it's corporate mudslinging at its finest, a vain attempt to differentiate themselves from the free "competition" by including terms that the public can identify with (like "stable", "secure", and "fast") that have very little technical merit. A page explaining NDA agreements and the politics of the situation wouldn't make a real convincing ad, and would prove that Xi is doing little more than attempting to translate a political advantage into an economic one.
My 2e-2 cents...
So are you saying that they know how to make good servers for something that's still shit?
Or are you saying "X" when you mean "XFree86"?
At least some posters in this thread, when they say "X is shit", are referring to the X Window System, rather than to a particular set of server implementations for it; are you saying
(I'm not taking a position on whether X sucks or not; I'm just asking whether you think using XiG's servers is sufficient to make it not suck, or whether the real answer might be "use something other than X", e.g. Berlin?
I now have a different graphics card, and I'm back on XF86 (those vmware accellerations are hard to beat), but I wouldn't hesitate to go to a commercial X server if I started having problems again. Nor should you.
That's a bit of a religious issue. If you believe in free software and the philosophies behind it, that's a very strong reason not to go commercial.
If I were having trouble running my graphics card under X-Free, and I had $150 with which to rectify the situation, I would have no trouble deciding what to do. Buy a new graphics card with better XFree support.
I don't use commercial software when there's a viable free alternative. Nor should you.
This is getting a bit off-topic but I've had
/************ Begin Standard ANTI-FLICKER CODE***/
/******** End ANTI-FLICKER CODE ***************/ //show size of applet
//Just to be nice, lower this thread's priority
//so it can't interfere with other processing going on.
// Thread.currentThread().setPriority(Thread.MIN_PRIO RITY); //number crunching goes here
this problem for a while:
I believe the applet code below is the standard
way of doing animation in Java with buffering
to eliminate flicker.
When viewed with Netscape 4.51 or 4.07 on
a celeron 400 with Redhat 5.2 using a large
window in hi-res modes it slows X to a crawl
and hangs X.
I had to put a warning on my Solar System
model:
http://www.cuug.ab.ca/~kmcclary/
after getting a complaint from a guy who had
lost work in open X applications.
setPriority doesn't help.
Any workarounds or suggestions?
(Sorry, pasting this in has killed the indentation and "less-than" signs don't show.)
import java.awt.*;
import java.applet.*;
//Text message moves diagonally across screen
//Draws rectangle to indicate size of applet
public class CrashNN extends Applet{
int mesgpos;
public void init(){
new BusyThread(this).start();
}
private Image offScreenImage;
private Dimension offScreenSize;
private Graphics offScreenGraphics;
public final void update (Graphics g) {
Dimension d = getSize();
if((offScreenImage == null)||(d.width != offScreenSize.width)||
(d.height != offScreenSize.height)) {
offScreenImage = createImage(d.width, d.height);
offScreenSize = d;
offScreenGraphics = offScreenImage.getGraphics();
}
offScreenGraphics.clearRect(0, 0, d.width, d.height);
paint(offScreenGraphics);
g.drawImage(offScreenImage, 0, 0, null);
}
public void paint(Graphics g){
g.drawString("CrashNN", mesgpos, mesgpos);
Dimension dd = getSize();
g.drawRect(2,2,dd.width - 9, dd.height - 9);
}
}
class BusyThread extends Thread{
CrashNN aa;
public BusyThread(CrashNN a){
aa= a;
}
public void run(){
while (true){
for(int i = 10; i 100; i++){
for(int j = 1; j 1000; j++);
try{
sleep(30);
}catch(InterruptedException e){}
aa.mesgpos = i;
aa.repaint();
}
}
}
}
(of course, KDE only locked up after I upgraded KDE from within KDE, so... duh? :o) GNOME, otoh, keeps forgetting my settings on the loptop... time to try October GNOME)
--
--
Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
We typically support overlapped older and newer Linux technologies for some time. For example, we supported both a.out and ELF concurently for about 18 months and we've been supporting libc5 and glibc2 for some time.
So, I guess we agree. We offer free bug fixes and new products are new money, just like video playback (tried playing a DVD in that hypothetical VCR, have you ;-) ). New product releases for us, are a consequence of a new feature and inability to offer a compatible update with previous release.
Cheers, JeremyC.
Jeremy Chatfield, Technical Evangelist, Xi Graphics.
I have AccelX 5.0.2 for Linux.
It crashes on the SiS 5598 chipset at random.
XFree86 3.3.5 at least stays up.
I would not mind their add compain if it was
completely, but I have examples of the contrary.
XawTV has fits starting up under AccelX running
on S3Virge/DX, something about their
implementation of DGA is screwy. And the PS/2
MS IntelliMouse on my server works for only
minutes at a time, then the mouse pointer shifts
to the corner and any mouse movement results in
random pointer movements and button presses. I had
to go back to XFree86.
The X Server is not the operating system kernel. It runs in user space. It needs to be root privilige because it accesses and manipulates low level hardware directly. If you have a piece of software that can change register contents and some of those registers change things like bus handling (e.g. DMA, IRQ) then you can do things to make the machine stop working. Try running your system with interrupts disabled. The kernel may be working, but it is getting nothing useful done. FWIW, a properly X Server can cause the kernel to panic, but only via system calls. The other poster that referred to this wasn't clear, but I think they might have intended that the X Server itself can't generate panics. In 1994/1995 one of the most common kernel halt problems reported with Accelerated-X on Linux and FreeBSD was a defective system call for keyboard handling. This has been corrected in both kernels for about four years. However, when it existed, remapping the casp lock key to be a control key would eventually provoke the kernel crash. So, you are right that the X Server is a user level process. It is, however, unusual in UNIX programs in that from user space, it manipulates low level hardware. That does not make intrinisically less safe than running the same code from the kernel. There are many modes of failure of an X Server. Some of them result in system lockup. Some result in the X Server locking up. Some result in incorrect response to a correct request. Only (extensive) testing finds the problems. Only diciplined programming and a respect for the customers data results in the bugs being fixed. Cheers, JeremyC.
Jeremy Chatfield, Technical Evangelist, Xi Graphics.
I wasn't impresseed with MetroX. I tried it on my old rendition based card and it was unaccelerated just like the XFree86 server. I couldn't imagine paying money for it. Accelerated X ran quite nicely on that card.
Yup, but be carefull with this on a production system. You are in effect giving all local users root, unless you disable it with the sysctl. But that would kind of defy the purpose.
I've not had any problems with the 'free' X Server that came with my distribution. In fact I have 3d accelerated drivers for it and my G200 and RivaTNT cards. But, it's just marketing. They have to compete against a 'free' X server and they have to point at something to say their X is better.
Actually, AX does support the wheel mouse, and does a much better job at it than anything I've been able to accomplish using X-Free and Imwheel. I'm not sure what version of AX you were using, but it my wheel mouse worked immediately upon running it. :)
Click on the link for the ~371k jpg.
--
Well that happened to me before, the gpm errors, i mean. I used a serial Genius NetMouse and switched the gpm to 'pnp' type and it fixed that. hope it helps.
I believe you can assign actions to a few special click sequences with GPM. Use gpm in repeater mode and try that. Or if you have a gameport, there's a small program somewhere on freshmeat that'll exec specified commands on connection of specified pins.
Well, some other companies may well advertise their product[s] in a clueless fashion, so "like every other company does" doesn't necessarily mean "in a fashion that shouldn't be roasted".
Methinks "our product is better, because it's not a piece of free software, it's Commercial-Quality Software" may not be the best approach if you're trying to sell to a community of people running an operating system made out of, err, umm, free software....
I.e., it's not clear that
is in and of itself a sufficient reason to believe that "free software does a good job" applies to an OS kernel and OS libraries (Linux and glibc, say) but not to an X server.
...as of AccelX 4.1.2 they still had a "dissappearing/corrupting" mouse cursor problem reminiscent of a MIT-SHM bug(very annoying when using Blender or the Gimp), couldn't use DGA extensions, and couldn't drop below 640x480 resolution. The only reason I ordered it in the first place was to support my i740 card, and when the XBF project produced an XF86 driver two weeks after I ordered it..
It _is_ faster than XF86, and you do get a nice splash screen, but XF86 is more feature-rich, IMHO.
Also, I could be mistaken, but it seems that the version of Accel-X I had didn't install any X source. When I compiled xanim for the first time, I had an error, and the author of xanim pointed out the problem--in the XF86 libraries that were still installed on my machine.
--
I don't seem to remember seeing those problems on my Debian partition at home, but I didn't install XiG's libraries - I bought it for the server, not for the client code (at the time, XFree86 didn't, as far as I know, contain support for the Number Nine Revolution IV-FP card; amusingly enough, I have XiG to thank for discovering that XFree86 later added support, as they had something on their Web site, as I remember, comparing Accelerated-X and XFree86 performance with that card), so I'm just using the XFree86 client code that came with Debian.
Debian doesn't start up xdm on my home machine because it doesn't think XFree86 has been set up, but that's about the only place I've seen where Debian was unhappy about Accelerated-X.
Autodetection has certainly improved things on those cards where it works, but it fails on a lot of hardware (eg the ever-popular ATI hardware). But things have at least gotten to the point where you can more or less pick your video card off of a list and have it work.
Unfortunately that's only the first part of configuration. The next part is the monitor, and here there are lots of problems. The monitor lists have huge holes and even monitors on the lists can be overdriven by the server. For instance: just try running a Sony Multiscan 20sfII at 1024x768 sometime. The monitor is on the list and the list specs are the same as the published specs -- but it still doesn't work. Have a laptop display? Good luck: not only aren't there any on the lists, the manufacturers don't give specs. It's take-a-guess-and-hope-I-don't-fry-the-display.
I've literally spent more time fiddling with monitor configurations than all other Linux installation tasks combined, and that includes stuff like debugging the driver for my new wireless network card. Your basic user just gets scared when confronted with the questions asked by the Custom Monitor configuration. (Hell, I get scared. You can blow a monitor if you guess wrong!)
I realize that the XFree86 folk are stuck between a rock and a hard place here. This stuff is really complicated and they're getting little or no help from the vendors. But it's still a problem and we do ourselves no favor by pretending that it's not.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
I used to use Accelerated X because it actually was superior to XFree... at least before version 5 came out. I switched when I discovered that it created a nonlinear framebuffer in my I128 card and I couldn't use my new television card. No DGA support either.
Xaccel version 4.2 was really fast and crashed much less than XFree in its time. But I'm pissed that I spent $100 on an upgrade that wasn't worth s%@*. It crashed and ate ram like a pig. These days, I can run XFree for a week without having to restart it - which is a real tribute to those hard-working good guys over there at XFree86.org.
Anyhow, kudos to XFree and rotten eggs to XAccel. That's what I say. Have a nice day.
Learn from your parents' mistakes: use birth control.
Does it? It drives me nuts that I can't cut and paste from emacs to Netscape. If Accelerated X would fix that, it might be worth the money.
D
----
Over the last four years we've seen linux, and free Unix in general, reach heights of stability and performance that once seemed entirely unreasonable. In the last year, these free (to hell with OS!) operating environments have made equivalently great strides toward mainstream acceptance.
Dandy as that may be, all of tehse still have a ways to go. Xig addresses some of these problems in a traditional, and what seems to be an honorable way. They write good code.
So it's commericial! Big deal. Their only real competition in the intel-unix market comes from Xfree. Xfree, however, produces a product that is far less stable and speedy than AccelX.
Don't flame me for this one, guys. It's simple fact. At least, it's simple fact for now.
This ad, however, is disheartening. Xig's strengths as a company have always lain in their fair dealings, quick response and honest answers. Their products' strenghts have always been speed, stability and service -- and, sorry to be insulting here, but if you don't think service is an issue talk to me after you graduate from college. This ad, however, mentions none of the effort Xig has made over the last years. Rather, it slings mud at the equally honorable effort made by Xfree.
This ad, frankly, makes me believe that Xig is on its way to the grave. That would be a sad thing indeed. I can think of no reason other than blind fear for them to make a marketing move that is simply this stupid.
Anyway, I will continue to use their products where they are best suited (like working my Viper 770 Ultra under FreeBSD) until their product seems as poorly thought as their ad.
BTW: solution to the telnet in and kick X problem: hook a wyse terminal up to the serial port. Or would that be considered a kludge? :)
Hrm... X is old. X is optimized for uses other than single-machine desktop use. X can do things other (and much more recent) GUIs can't; for example X can run applications transparently even over high-latency network connections.
X is not shit, and there's a reason it's been around this long. IMO, however, its strongest suit is not powering a single desktop or workstation. It's behind in some areas, but well ahead in others.
There's no excuse for a hanging PCI board, but there's even less excuse for the PCI subsystem to permit one to lock up the system.
"You've crossed my Line of Death!" "What? No! Where is it?" "Here in the fine print...."
Unfortunately for xig, I bought MetroX, but I will vouch for Xfree86 "falling over". It happens people. It may not happen to you but it does happen.
When I was running Xfree on my Matrox Mystique card, I would have daily system lockups where the keyboard, mouse, and network all went down. Interestingly, linux really didn't, as proven by my still-running cron jobs, but the system was all but unusable (a solipsistic turing machine). It wasn't until I saw xig's ad that I put two and two together. Once I installed MetroX, I had uptimes of a month or more. Just goes to show you that you really don't want a buggy X server, whoever makes it.
I now have a different graphics card, and I'm back on XF86 (those vmware accellerations are hard to beat), but I wouldn't hesitate to go to a commercial X server if I started having problems again. Nor should you.
Othervise Bloatscape blows up in my face. No Linux/X crash however. RH5.2 Fvwm2 in T style(no [K,G]-bloat for me).
LINUX stands for: Linux Inux Nux Ux X
FRA: STFU GTFO
Please note that this is not a formal response, just a posting.
The XFree community is a very out-spoken, passionate group, and we applaud it. As many users find XFree unstable, some do not. Our products are not intended for the person capable of cracking open the source, tracking down the problem, and fixing it. As many users feel it unreasonable to pay for software, our products are not your solution either. Xi provides exceptional service along with exceptional products. Albeit, the products are not 100% bug free, but we are striving to get there. When a bug or problem is encountered, the most efficient and effective steps possible are taken to provide a solution.
For those who have not experienced Xi Graphics, Inc. in a while, or never have, please visit our web site ( www.xig.com ) do some performance research ( http://www.xig.com/Pages/BenchmarkMasterPage.html ), and no, these tests are not weighed in our favor, x11perf is available via ftp and I invite you to compare with our posted results. Give our demo a try ( http://www.xig.com/Pages/DemoInstructions.html ), compare with your current Xserver and respectfully post the results or email them to me. I believe the performance and stability of Accelerated-X(TM) will pleasantly surprise many.
For those people who have reported problems and issues with Xi Graphics, Inc. or Accelerated-X, please feel free to contact me, I will address any technical issues, comments, or opinions.
As for the longevity of Xi Graphics, Inc., business is great. Xi will continue to provide innovative products that surprise, astound, and stir people.
Cheers,
Drew Brandt
Xi Graphics, Inc.
Technical Marketing
dbrandt@xig.com
Everything was stopped. Just by opening some nedstat page.
OTOH that only happened once or something (well I didn't open that page anymore
I could crash XF86 with switching from some SVGALIB app(like quake I in console mode) to X .
Accelerated X has its uses in the portable market but that's about it, most Graphic cards are supported under XF86 and I can't seem to find a reason to pay for something I don't have any extra benefits from. For a list of supported cards, look here.
--
People using html in email should be shot.
Whooptie doo ;) My NT doesn't crash either. Big deal. Windows sucks? Same can be said of Linux on many topics. Darn isn't life tough ;)
I don't know about the rest of you but XFree86 really hasn't been unreliable for me. In fact, it's never even crashed.
It's a total bitch to configure, but aside from that....
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
Thanks! The program is jslaunch.
Its not compact disc darned it! Its compact dish...get it right. Its a saucer for a cup. :)
(ok ok, one too many cd-)ch jokes)
OFTC: By the community, for the community
Maybe AccelX crashed here and took the system down ;-)
I've used AcceleratedX for 7 months now since they offered support for a particular laptop graphics chip that Xfree didn't. The installation/configuration process is nothing like Xfree. I had a working server config in about 30 seconds....whereas Xf86setup can still sometimes take an hour if i switch to a different monitor. ....
XiG tends to have support for chips 3-6 months before Xfree, and the server itself is much faster. Sure, $150 was a lot to pay, but if I waited for the open source version, I would have been carrying around a $2500 vt100
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
Has anyone ever thought of writing a little daemon that polls the X server every 10 seconds or so to see if it is still there, and kills it if it's crashed? That would come with every X package? Ok, you would still lose your running GUI stuff, but at least you wouldn't have to reset. That would make a difference, also psychologically: I only ever had to reset a computer running Linux when the X server crashed and I couldn't login from another machine.
and now for something completely different
Well... That ad definatly convinced me. Convinced me not to buy Xi products that is. I think I'll stick with my "unstable" XFree86. Since after configuation of machines over the last 6 or 7 years, I don't think I've had it crash or lock. Gee, I must just be real lucky or something.
I believe that due to a wacky combination of Xfree, KDE, Netscape, and the allignment of the planets, I was forced to assume my Linux box was rendered frozen a couple times -- and hit the power button. (Arrrghghg). Once I eventually put the machine on my University's LAN, and it happened all of once more, I was able to trot down to a computer lab, telnet into the machine, and kill the processes as root. When I returned to my dorm, all was fine, Xfree had restarted, and KDM was asking for a login: this time (and ever since) I opted for WindowMaker. Love it.
I have been using Xfree since August 1995.
In that time I have had 3 X server crashes.
The first one was due to me being slightly overeager with the configuration settings and I left things in a real mess. It was therefore my fault.
The next time I don't know what happenned, X caught some signal or something and bombed out. I was then left at the shell prompt, I restarted X and everything was OK again.
The thrid time was a complete lockup, I couldn't do anything although if I'd had a network I could probably have telneted in and killed X to recover. Instead I crossed my fingers and hit that reset button.
At work I use NT I only have to go back a month to tell you about the last three crashes, which leave me no option but to remove the power cord from the back.
Also: Note that it isn't necessary to have a network or even a second PC. If you enable a virtual terminal on a serial port then you can use a PalmPilot to login and kill processes. I expect any PDA with a serial connection can be used to do the same.
you can still hate something and not bother supporting promised efforts like mozilla.
i can't wait t ill i get my new project underway and start developing mozilla & ie plugins, but i still think netscape 4.x is the worst browser - wait - worst software i can think of (atm) that i've ever used.
There is an interesting law for this in France: You can only do comparative ads if your ad is backed up by some kind of real benchmark-like comparison, or based on an independant comparison (done by the press for example). I don't know the exact details, but the result in reality is that we almost never see comparative advertising here...
Sure, they had the aforementioned commercial all over the back of my last LJ issue. I read it, and though ``hell, these guys better buckle for the bumpy ride that's about to hit them hard, in the face, twice''. Sure, it's really good old mudslinging.
:) But the problem is that marketing were marketing for techies, and should have applied techie-ethics (read: community-ethics) not marketing ethics). Marketing ethics are fine when marketing for marketing people. Not when marketing for people who know words such as ``fair'', ``correct'' and ``respect''.
But keep in mind, that he who slings mud, looses ground.
I don't use their X server, and I'm not planning to. But if I was planning to, I might reconsider. It's not that a clueless marketing department will necessarily make their X server a bad one. Not at all. In fact i'm pretty sure their X server is a fine one.
But if their internal communication is so vague, that the marketing people have no clue what-so-ever that that is Not The Way (TM) to write an advertisment for the community, I seriously doubt that the executives know what product those ``techie'' guys are brewing, that the techies hear what customer support knows, and in the end, I doubt that the company as a whole is a company I could trust. Trust for support, and trust to be around in two years from now.
Yes, it's a little exaggerated, I know. You see marketing-, executive- and tech- departments missing eachothers points and goals even small companies. There are probably few companies out there where people in different departments actually have a clue about not only the goals, but also the ethics and methods used by other departments.
(Ok, code of ethics for marketing departments, that's easy.
So there you go. Convinced? No, neither am I. That said, to a certain extent, they're right. Although XFree86 provides far more than a modicum of graphics support, AccelX is faster, and the design of AccelX is much cleaner, with a single X server and loadable drivers. Hopefully XFree86-4.0 should fix this. And like it or not, corporate customers like to give money away in exchange for peace of mind (whether justified or not). They really *do* think that paying Xig for an X server will mean less crashes. In my experience, both AccelX and XFree86 have crashed on me exactly once each, so both are pretty stable. Don't credit corporate types with logical thought processes -- they simply don't have them. If AccelX is a way to please them, then so be it. The advertising still smarts for the rest of us, though.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
but i've managed to fuck up every peice of software ever made. anything on linux, including the x server, made it fairly hard for me to screw up. why would i pay money for something that already works good?
>>>> Accel-X 5.0 also has an integrated TTF server which saves a lot of pain.
It's not AccelX which has done the integration, but the OSS project based on XFree86. I believe AccelX is built upon that. Though it's not yet in official package from XFree86 project, TTF support itself is already in XFree86 package from Redhat, Debian, or any other major distribution (I'm using Debian GNU/Linux (potato)).
Anyone know if www.x11.org is still alive? They seem to be locked in a kind of never-ending delay.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
The XFree project's goal is to produce "a freely redistributable implementation of the X Window System that runs on UNIX(R) and UNIX-like operating systems (and OS/2)." Slamming them in an ad campaign is kind of a cheap shot -- they're volunteers producing a product because they think it's "The Right Thing To Do", not to compete in a commercial marketplace...
I think the point of the submission is that XiG is slamming a product that's provided gratis, free-of-charge, fo' no money, etc, and representing it like some third-rate software package when, for all experiences and reports, it's actually quite stable and useful.
And keep in mind, the XFree project has almost certainly been a driving force behind Linux' acceptance and popularity. Think about it: would as many people have been so likely to start using Linux on a regular basis if the only X server available was commercial and cost at least $100? I know I wouldn't have.
I wonder if XiG is worried that XFree 4.0 will come out and give them a real run for their money, for no money.
-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-
My mom's going to kick you in the face!
That being said, there are tradeoffs. Because userspace graphics need direct access to the hardware, they need to run setuid root, which means security issues. SVGALib is especially problematic because it's actually "foreign" code, linked against the library, that runs as root, rather than just the server (or xdm) in the case of X. I think it deals with this fairly intelligently, though, dropping root privileges at the first possible juncture. It's still not perfect.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
I've had X crash on me a bunch of times (or maybe it was Gnome, or Enlightenment, or something else -- irregardless, the GUI stops responding) so I just hit CTRL-ALT-F1 and kill the X server. It's happened more times than I can remember. X taking Linux with it? I don't think so.
--- Dirtside
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I would hope, though I doubt it, that you would move away from Mandrake then. Mandrake's focus and goal is the addition of KDE to RedHat! If you're not even using X, why support Mandrake? If you want to get in and learn the system, why not try Debian/Slackware/Redhat?
Howard C. Shaw III Grum
Cut and paste between Netscape and Emacs works fine for me, though netscape has the bad habit of killing the clipboard when you deselect text. What, exactly are you trying to do that won't work ?
...but it never takes Linux down with it. Actually, X just crashed on me just 10 minutes ago, but I was still able to hit Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get to a virtual terminal. The issue is not whether the operating system comes down with X; rather, the issue is whether X should come down in the first place. If we use statements like "when the X server falls over" instead of "if the X server falls over" we are admitting that there is an integral piece of the system that is not functioning properly, perhaps as poorly as *cough cough* Windows.
and besides, the Xig server is probably based on the same source base as XFree86. (The source code from MIT)
E hasn't crashed once on me since about December 98, E0.16.0 is rock solid.
And when E does crash, X doesn't crash, it just happily exits because the process that was keeping it open (Enlightenment) doesn't exist, but because it doesn't know E crashed, it thinks that you want to close X.
(And it's only been through 1 rewrite, which was to get rid of all the old Fvwm code left in and change the internal design).
Iain
Just in case you wonder who these people are, their web page is at http://www.xigraphics.com.
Maybe I'm spoiled, because I have a Matrox Millennium G200, but XFree86 works great!
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
> It drives me nuts that I can't cut and paste from emacs to Netscape.
Select in emacs and middle click in Netscape works, but if it's URLs you want to copy for jumping to, there's something much better: browse-url-at-point.
It will make netscape display the URL at the cursor position (using netscape -remote).
I found out about it because it was bound to C-c C-z u in html-helper-mode, but I found it so useful that I have bound it to C-c u globally -- it's pretty useful in mail mode as well!
browse-url-at-point is part of the standard elisp libraries, for (gnu) emacs 20.3, at least; html-helper-mode is not (although it might be for xemacs), see http://www.santafe.edu/~nelson/tools/ for that.
Jeroen Nijhof
Lets put it this way, I have linux on my machine with a Diamond Monster Fusion Card (Banshee). I have X windows working with it (not an easy feat).
To my surprise X windows has never crashed even because of my worthless video card.
Also most people don't realize that software is a major cause of system crashes, so watch what you run! Also if you are using RedHat distro try Ctrl-Alt-F2 if you get a black login screen it is not locked up!
Also addressing the M$ issues, windows isn't that bad, unlike linux I don't have to bend over backwards to get a program working.....
Quid rides ignare?
They should know that X is like your friend's boyfriend. She complains and complains about how lazy he is, and how he smells bad, and the second you say "Where's that laze boyfriend?" she goes apeshit on you for insulting her man. Insulting X is like putting down an old good dog. We all know there are flaws, but some damn proprietary company starts raggin' on XFree and we're gonna kick some ass!
We use xig's AcceleratedX 5.x to provide multi-headed support. However, it is not at all stable with Red Hat 6.1 (though it is fine with Red Hat 6.0 and Debian 1.2). If you want an example, try running kpackage, then slide the scroll bar for the package tree up and down. You'll be logging in and rebooting remotely in no time!
We use AcceleratedX because it works with our multi-headed hardware today, but we are keeping a very close eye on XFree and anxiously awaiting 4.0 and xenerama as a possible replacement down the road, with plans to switch when XFree 4.0 is stable and well tested.
AcceleratedX's strengths are its early access to hardware specs (providing support for hardware XFree doesn't) and the features it offers today which XFree doesn't yet (multiheaded support being the critical one for us). It is IMHO very foolish of xig to sling mud like this. Their market is comprised of Linux users, many of whom (myself included) take offense at that kind of ridicule against an Open Source project, especially when the ridicule is nothing more than FUD of the worst kind -- something Linux users and administrators are very good at seeing through.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Second, I had a card (purchased for use with Windows games) that had NO support under XFree (at the time). It wasn't that I had NO choice, it was that Xi was the best choice at the time. Now, a couple of years later, XFree has support for the card, but completely unaccelerated. So I upgraded Xi and still use it.
$100.00 is more than I like to pay, but it is not "too much", it was still very worth it to me.
It was easier to install, easier to modify, easy to upgrade with the downloads from Xi, and it's extremely fast.
I don't agree with their propoganda, but it is a good piece of software.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Hmm? I have no problems cutting and pasting between an xterm, gvim, netscape, or just about anything else. This sounds bizarre to me, but I don't have emacs installed to test with. Sometimes you need to use the right-menu paste option in Netscape and sometimes the center button.
Sumner
-- rage, rage against the dying of the light
I remember a couple years back when I bought XInside's xserver for faster Matrox support, but the thing kept crapping out when I used Gimp or Enlightenment. Server hangs, graphic artifacts all kinds of stuff. When X11 supported my Matrox (in a couple months), no bugs at all. Go figure.
Competition by negative campaigning often backfires and, even when successful, can lead to a more apathetic audience, which can actually lead to fewer sales in the long run. (Voting figures are a good example of this. The years of negative campaigns run by politicians have carved away from the number of people who can be bothered to vote. Why bother? Much the same happened in the UK, during the Thatcher Years.)
The only way to be successful, and KNOW you're selling a good product, is to sell on merit, not deficit. If people buy your product, because they believe it does what they want, and keep buying, because it DID what they want, you have a good, long-term future. On the other hand, if you DO get people to buy, because they believe everything else is so much carp, you stand to lose your entire customer base when the competition shatters the illusion. They only have to do so once.
A company is never stronger than it's foundation. A foundation of bullshit and FUD doesn't offer much security.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The DDD application seems to crash pretty often, if you use the scroll bars for the data display window. When it crashes it does some sort of a keyboard and mouse grab, which makes it impossible to switch to another virtual console or kill the X server.
However, I have never tried the magic SysRq key. It might be possible to force the X server to die that way.
...since my old Slackware 3 box had an X Server
that crashed quite frequently, but never brought
the OS down.
Steff
I won a copy of this program from Linux Today. It turned out to not be the laptop version (which I needed at the time)(Darn Neo-Magic) but it was the desktop version instead. All of my Linux machines have Matrox Millenium II's inside, and I was actually noticing more crashes on the machine with the XIG drivers. I noticed 2 crashes in the first month. (!) The machine was still accessible over the network (only for a reboot), but was unresponsive to any of the std. escape sequences. For comparison, I maybe crashed Xfree twice in a year previously, and the process was always killable with an escape seq. or a top over the network. After two months their CD was being used as a drink coaster. Add in the inconvenience of a less than intuitive setup, and no real performance benefit that was noticeable, and now I only reccommend their package for cards that are unsupported by the base distro.
I would also like to add that I did at some point in the proces need tech support, and I never got through on the telephone, and I never recieved an E-mail that was not an auto-responder. Now a newbie needing install support would not be able to get it from his Distro provider, and no response from XIG?? That sounds like a lose-lose situation.
In the interest of fairness, the Matrox acceleration is the best among the Xfree servers, and other people using ATI or such might experience different results. This experience that I relate happened ~1 1/2 years ago, so the state of their customer service and/or their drivers might be quite different. (But the the Xfree SVGA server has gotten better too...)
Other points of interest: Since Xfree SVGA is open source, you can diagnose and fix any driver problems yourself if you know how. But then I hardly think that this ad targets folks with know how... This is just another case of FUD.
Jason Maggard
hamnrye@mindspring.com
"I went mad for a while, It did me no end of good..."
-Z. Beeblebrox
"At least Microsoft just spouts sunshine about itself."
Yeah, they can afford to pay other people to do their mudslinging.
I don't think the image slashdot linked to of the ad was scanned in by the same folks whg produced it. It's on linux.com after all.
This ad definitely plays on the FUD aspect of "free" software as being unsupported. Kind of a cheap shot, but not entirely ineffective towards non-techies who question open-source software reliablity and support. These folks might buy into Xig's gig just because they are promoting support.
Intrestingly, they imply the size of the X server versus the kernel make it automatically suspect. Microsoft, take note....
The ad also implies the X server is an intimate part of the OS as opposed to being just an application. That itself is incorrect, but to a non-techie, it "appears" to be that way (ie. if your windows start dying, your system must be crashing). And that may be all that counts.
Even given that X itself is extremely stable, I've lost work on it when it has died. KDE and GNOME probably haven't boosted anyone's confidence level when dealing with X either, but if asked by management, I'd dismiss the ad out of hand (but start mumbling about a stable window manager).
-S. Louie
"I may be Love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it."
I started with Accel-X when I upgraded to a new machine with a Matrox Mystique card. At the time, the XFree86 SVGA server was somewhat unstable with the Mystique and it lacked a lot of features and acceleration. I still have Accel-X 4.X with a Matrox G100 on my main computer, but I switched to XFree86 on my other box when I got a TNT card for it. Only Accel-X 5.0 supports the TNT and I haven't been compelled to spend another $50 for an upgrade.
Anyway, here are my impressions of the product:
- Accel-X is easier to install and configure than XFree86.
- It is significantly faster than XFree86 on most cards, and extremely fast with Matrox cards.
- It seems to be a little better at garbage collection, or is more memory efficient, or both.
- Accel-X is very stable with my cards. Of course, so is XFree.
Accel-X 5.0 also has an integrated TTF server which saves a lot of pain. Overall, I'd have to say that I've found Accel-X to be a better X server than XFree86. So if there was no cost involved, and no hassle of ordering and waiting for them to ship it to you, I'd easily choose Accel-X. However, XFree86 has improved quickly. Two or three years ago, they were so far behind in speed, features, and hardware support that I wouldn't consider anything but Accel-X. Now, I find that the advantages of Accel-X are not enough to compel me to upgrade.
Anyway, I wouldn't worry too much about Xig going under due to XFree86. They still have a performance edge, and much of their market comes from supplying X servers to other operating systems. Before Linux, they got into business selling replacements for the abysmal X server in SCO UNIX. Metro-X, on the other hand, is really going to dissapear quick. Accel-X was always much, much better than Metro-X and now even XFree86 is probably better.
Guys correct me if im wrong. ( sure someone will)
but didn't Xig get there original code from XFree?
I thought that they did. I tried there demo server on a laptop a long time ago... It did not work. The only time I have ever had a problem with XFree was with Beta servers for 3dfx and TNT chips... and those server were not official... I have be running Linux for over 4 years. I just can't remember one time when a official Xfree server crashed. Maybe I'm lucky. Maybe I'm forget full. But this sounds like a unfair slam.
Last one in jail is a fascist.
Of course, that was a month ago. And two months before that they had a similar blurb. I'd give them another month before another such blurb arises. ;)
In short: don't hold your breath.
~ Kish
Hi, I've had a Matrox Ultima/VLB and now I have a Matrox Permedia G100. The Ultima came with NDAs for driver development and the G100 was too new for XFree when I bought it. My opinion of AccX (one of the products from Xig) is: very fast, very stable, but non-linux directories make X-app development awkward. As an European, I'm not used to comparative advertising and find it rude and even somewhat childish.
... that even on a 1600 x 1200 the image is too big and is too slow...
... that just because it has a price tag isn't a valid selling point (actually that defines selling point...but you get my drift)...
... that various managers will buy into this and cost IT departments more and more money so that important items like pencils and paper are rationed out in ludicrious manners...
...ugh...
You say you want a revolution?
Hmm. What a great way to reach to Open Source/Free Software/what have you community!
Openly trounce the free version. I know it works for Microsoft. I can't stand using a equivalent product that's free cause I can't truly rely on it.
I know Xig is just trying to compete, but honestly do they think that tactics defined by the evil empire will work with their target market? Until I see numbers, charts, and feel the effect that they describe here, why not use an equally good product that also happens to be free?
Bad form, Xig. Give me an ad when you're ready to play in this league.
ALL HAIL BRAK!!!
Funny... i had 3-4 Xcrashes i can remember. at least 2 of them AccelX4 ;O) And i only used that buggy piece of crap for like 2 weeks.
Competition is good. Mudslinging breeds competition. I'm all for companies bashing products like this, but I am a bit concerned that it may not be truthful.
My X doesn't crash at all anymore, but it use to. This adds claim, may be a bit out of date.
-- Moondog
If you are using the glibc version of netscape try going back to the libc5 version. glibc netscape crashes on me every few minutes it seems.
This phenomenon seems to pop up with amusing regularity in the 'nix world. Every once in a while, some marketing genius comes up with the brilliant idea to jump on the popularity of the open source bandwagon by.......showing how their product is proprietary and and thus superior. It's really difficult to say if they are just clueless or somewhat thick.
Free hint to marketers - if you're trying to target free/open software customers, DON'T TRY TO IMPRESS THEM BY SAYING YOU'RE THE OPPOSITE.
Look at the above statement and think real hard. Repeat till done.
L.
There is more to X then the Xserver...
XI seems to of forgot this I think, most people who use XI, JUST use there server... nothing else.
Kinda foolish add I think.
"Think of it as evolution in action."
Although Netscape did just cause my my Worst Linux Crash Ever yesterday - after running for a few weeks (yes, weeks), it ate all all my memory and took down my X server and my login shell. Still didn't crash the OS, though. Meanwhile, at work my PowerMac gets completely hosed by Netscape on a regular basis. (Well, it's got to be either Netscape or Apple's CD player...)
Too bad the Chimera browser isn't in development anymore. I used to run it on NetBSD about three years ago - basic browsing functionality, small, fast, stable, extensible.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
This assumes that X is still alive enough to grab that hotkey, which isn't always the case.
If it's not, all you have are the kernel hotkeys, which don't get you much further than ctrl-alt-del, or the sysrq's.
I don't think any of those will get you to a console.
Anyone know for sure?
So a lot of XiG's problem with XFree86 is historical and personality-driven. The XiG marketing guys go out of their way to try and destroy XFree86, not that it's done them much good.
The other commercial X company in this space, Metro Link, is reasonably supportive of the open source community. If I were going to buy a commercial X server, I'd look there first.
Seems to me like they're preaching to the wrong group. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with commercialware, but saying that running a "Commerical Quality" XServer on Linux seems to be a slap in the face of Open/Free/Whatever software.
What's good for the Kernel isn't good for the X-Server?
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
The first is thinking that it's a mudslinging campaign, the other is to realize that within commercial realms, mudslinging (and I think the choice of the word mudslinging is interesting here - if the ad had been from an "unpopular" company, then it would have been FUD) is inevitable, and seeing a commercial company "mudsling" within the community signifies that the company realizes that there is a market in linux, and their customer base in that area is increasing.
So, if you choose, you can see ads like these as a success story in a way for linux.
Don't sweat the small stuff - there has always been infighting in the linux community, the only difference now being that is *appears* as if a company has joined in too.
Nothing to see here, move along, move along.
David
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
I note Linux Journal has run this ad for the last 2 months, on the back cover of their mag.
I think this is interesting because although we have seen Linux as a whole attacked by commercial competitors (Case in point, Microsoft), generally, other open source efforts have been left alone by their commercial counterparts.
It disappoints me a little that Linux Journal ran this ad, although I appreciate they need the advertising revenue. However, maybe they could have asked Metro-X to reword the ad to hilight Accelerated X's features rather than dissing XFree86's problems.
hummer
I'll admit it: I had crashes using XMetro in
multihead mode.
Then I wrote and described the crashes, and they
sent me a patch.
Since then, it's been rock-solid on a two-headed
system. Even when it had the crash, the *only*
crash condition was that, if I stopped and started
X a few times, it could hang. During usage, it
didn't crash. Ever.
I use my X desktop about 12-15 hours a day, probably
(more, according to my spouse), and it's just
fine.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Accelerated X is all well and good. I have used it before, and while it may be more stable than that put out by XFree, who wants to pay for it?
;)
Lets take a look at the facts.
Accelerated X servers range in price from $100 to $300 depending on your setup, with higher prices for the "Developer's edition." What does this mean? Well, A nice OEM copy of Win98 runs around $89 or less. If I thought AcceleratedX was the only way to fly on Linux, I'd trot back to Microsoft. Why pay 4 times as much, even if it is 4 times better. I don't have a problem rebooting once a day.
In any event, the XFree project is doing an exelent job creating good, stable X servers. They are keeping up with vendors when it comes to display drivers, and seems fast and stable. Until I see my X server crash, Accelerated-X won't even cross my mind as anything of value. And as long as it's priced to kill, I'll never buy it.
Looks like maybe sysrq K will do it. I'll have to try this next time X totally dies.
select the text in one app, press the middle button in the second (after focus switches)
you should be fine...
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
Grrr. my nick is "Forward the Light Brigade"...
There was a recent problem with some versions of
XF86 not working on some versions of BSD/OS. Why?
Because the kernel was prohibiting the X server
from accessing certain regions of memory it wanted
to use to probe some chipsets.
So, there *is* a difference in protections, although
the X server mostly gets a pretty free rein.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
They do have one good point, though,for many users, if something goes wrong with X, it's linux's fault. (and we usually have the bad habit of brushing the user off as a newbie) I find it rather disappointing that the linux vendors are now slamming the food they feed on. It would be nice too if we could also come up with distribution standards. All these large commercial organizations coming out with different distros and packages (.tgz, .rpm, .slpi, to name a few), it's a headache for the developper and a major source of confusion.
DUH ! But most of the time it just doesn't fucking work. I heard this from other people too.
-- unix is for people without a social life - Patrick van Eijk
shouldn't that be "2e-2 dollars"? Right now your opinion is worth 2 hundredths of a cent. :)
Their chart :
http://www.xig.com/Pages/LaptopBENCHtables.html
shows they are comparing to Xfree86 3.3.3.1, so in claiming that Xfree86 doesn't support many of the cards is a lie.
Oh well, as the saying goes - lies, damn lies, statistics...
Hey, I do use AccelX and therefore trust "a closed source component" In fact, it beats the hell out of XFree on my system so why should I switch to something slower and basically, inferior ?
Heh. I've used XiG's AccelX server - one word to describe it. "Crashfest". All I had to do was switch out of X, and *bewm* lockup. I haven't had that problem with XFree86.
Maybe it's just me, but I hope that XFree86 4.0 will start the first nail in AccelX's coffin.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
I've only had an X lockup that totally froze my computer about 5 times ever. My video has been nuked a few more times, but the SysRQ keys still successfully did a clean boot on the system.
SysRQ-E (send TERM to all processes)
Wait until disk activity stops
SysRQ-I (send KILL to all processes)
Wait 2 seconds
SysRQ-U (remount all filesystems readonly)
Wait until disk activity (if any) stops
SysRQ-S (sync all disks)
Wait until disk activity stops, minium 2 seconds
SysRQ-B (reboot)
And it's all good.
* SysRQ on ix86es is Alt-PrtSc
* If nothing seems to happen when you press the keys, try doing the SysRQ sequence again, it sometimes gets sticky.
--------
"I already have all the latest software."
Since the Xserver is a critical piece of the operating system, who in their right mind would trust a closed source component?
all this makes me think about xig is what a slimy company