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XFree86 Enters Wondrous World Of CVS 96

Posted by Hemos from the tomorrow---walgreens! dept.
Quite a number of people have written with news from the USENIX annual technical conference. The news? The Xfree86 [?] folks have announced that XFree86 will now have CVS access.
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XFree86 Enters The Wonderous World of CVS More

XFree86 Enters The Wonderous World of CVS

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  • Great! With access to CVS those XFree86 folk can work smarter, not harder through the use of prescription drugs.

    (for those who don't understand, "CVS" is a huge drugstore chain in New England)
    --
  • I would just like to extend a BIG thanks to VA Linux for setting up SourceForge. I know that I've used it for projects and a lot of open source projects are using it to gain access to a CVS tree.

  • Re:For aspirin? (Score:3)

    by Sneakums ( 2534 ) on Friday June 23, 2000 @05:42AM (#980140)
    For those who don't understand, CVS is the Concurrent Versioning System, a program for code change and change conflict management.

    --
    "Where, where is the town? Now, it's nothing but flowers!"
  • I'm really glad to see the open source community understanding the technically and need, let alone making it a priority!

    *sound of me clapping*

    ----

  • It's good to see X becomming more open (Score:3)

    by richie123 ( 180501 ) on Friday June 23, 2000 @05:46AM (#980142) Homepage
    I think one of the most difficult things about X is that they rarely post any information on their web site, and their is no way to get an easy idea about the progress tht the X developers have made. I hope this begins to actract more developers, and improves the project a great deal.

  • Great (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Now when will it move into the 21st century and give us anti-aliasing? It's embarrasing to have Microsoft kick its ass for 10 years now.

  • CVS maintenance (Score:3)

    by ahornby ( 1734 ) on Friday June 23, 2000 @05:48AM (#980144) Homepage
    I use CVS daily and think its excellent. However there a number useful of patches with haven't made it into the main distribution literally for years.
    e.g.

    * alternate port number patch
    * proxy tunneling patch
    * LOCAL_BRANCH patch

    Is anyone reading this involved in the development of CVS itself and able to comment on when these patches will make it in?

  • My friend has a bunch of X, but he's never heard of a CVS. There must be some mistake.
    --

  • Haiku (Score:3)

    by YASD ( 199639 ) on Friday June 23, 2000 @05:50AM (#980146)

    Jump on board, hackers!
    Oh, wait...read only...dammit
    I clap with one hand

    ------
  • I think you'll find that Windows has been anti-aliasing fonts for at most 5 years. The feature was introduced in the "Plus!" pack for Windows 95.

    Acorn's Risc OS, on the other hand, has had anti-aliased outline fonts since approximately 1990.

    X apps can anti-alias fonts on the client side; the fact that server-side support is missing is not the unmitigated disaster it appears to be.

    --
    "Where, where is the town? Now, it's nothing but flowers!"
  • True, but this does lower the bar for those interested to get involved in development. Before, you had to go through a process of registering to be a developer. Now, you can check out the code and see if you've got what it takes before making the plunge.
  • They don't seem to have done that the traditional Sourceforge way !

    I didn't find any trace of the Sourceforge Home page, or the Bug Tracking or the forums ! too bad, as those nices features will for sure make the development more open
  • Posted by 11223:

    Actually, they'll be shipping asprin now with XFree86 for the people that have to set it up...
  • Great, all we need now is easier prolifiration of X. This reminds me of a movie I saw yesterday, "8 Heads in a Duffle Bag." The quote most relevant to this news?
    "Damn, I thought the old battle-ax would never die!" Back on a more serious topic, I think this will result in a faster, more stable X because more people will be able to contribute patches. You really couldn't do that on the release-based system because your code wasn't current enough to write a patch.
  • This is what I always have said is needed for XFree. They need to be much more open than in the past to get more bugs fixed etc. etc. On the other hand, some card-vendors won't give specifications to program their cards unless one signs a non-disclosure agreement. I hope to see accelerated development now. Time will tell if I was right.
    ------------------------------------------ --------------
    UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...

  • Re:CVS maintenance (Score:4)

    by Khalid ( 31037 ) on Friday June 23, 2000 @06:04AM (#980153) Homepage
    Open Avenue is now the official CVS maintainer ! they have recently bought Cyclic and promised to integrate many patchs floating around and develop CVS activly. They have even hired someone didacted entirely to this job.

    Have a look at the new CVS home at www.cvshome.org

  • Re:Great (Score:3)

    by Dysan2k ( 126022 ) on Friday June 23, 2000 @06:06AM (#980154) Homepage
    Sure.. but in 8-bit color, how do you decide what color palette to use? Are you going to remove colors for the Alpha-blending ability? Do you make anti-aliasing for only 15, 16, 24, and 32 bit palettes available? There are some concerns when it comes to that.

    Now, I'd personally LOVE to see alpha-blending/anti-aliasing in X myself. But the X protocol could do with some changes itself (compression, ssX...) to improve the speed some. Granted it's fast, but I've seen a TON of posts on /. on how it could be made much better. Maybe now with CVS, I can duck my head in there and see how much of a fiasco it would be to implement such things. (

    Of course, a setup program for X4.0 would REALLY be sweet at this point!h

  • Re:Great (Score:4)

    by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Friday June 23, 2000 @06:10AM (#980155)
    No it is an unmitigated disaster. The idea is that new features that can be server side, should be server side. It lowers memory usage (only one copy of anti-aliasing font libraries), it increases performance (especially over a network) and it lets apps automatically take advantage of the feature. BeOS is integrating a new true-type razterizer from Bitstream called FontFusion. Becauese all programs depend on the OS for font support, all programs will automatically take advantage of this feature. This is very important, if you want to retain a good user experience. Also, the fact that it is hard to add anti-aliased fonts is indicative of a larger problem in the system. I find it mind-boggling that the MIT guys decided to let if be extensible from a window manager point of view, but made the imaging model hard to extend. (Of course I doubt they thought people would still use the software in the year 2000!)
  • From the CVS access page:

    "Public access is provided by a machine supplied and hosted by SourceForge and VA Linux Systems."

    So, they're hosted at sourceforge already; the other nice features probably won't be long in coming :-)

    Cheers,

    Tim

  • just one question... (Score:4)

    by ywwg ( 20925 ) on Friday June 23, 2000 @06:16AM (#980157) Homepage
    I don't want to start a download of the entire tree just to get a little bit of info... namely, have they fixed dga mouse support yet? This question gets asked day-in and day-out on the newsgroups by all of us l33t gamerz who need a smoother mouse to play quake under linux.

    So, has it been fixed in CVS, or are you guys going to make me download it to find out? :P

  • Font anti-aliasing is a must, better compression, integrated encryption for connections across a network, ect. Maybe it's time for a new X spec. I hate to encourage breaking standards, but standards can do two things--shackle innovation or liberate innovation.

    At this point I think the X spec is shackling it.

  • I keep my thesis in a big CVS repository. It's in LaTeX so it consists of many different files. Has anyone else tried any -non-programming- things in CVS
  • Assuming SourceForge is ever accessible. Have they been under DoS attacks recently, or what?
  • Actually, CVS is the largest presciption based drug-chain in the USA. I know, I work at eckerd and we're number 3. Those CVS-ians. Bastards. That's ok, not all CVS' have pharmacies, but all ECKERDS DO. LONG LIVE THE BLUE AND WHITE!
  • >> Of course, a setup program for X4.0 would
    >> REALLY be sweet at this point!h

    If you'd read the docs, you'd know about XFree86 -configure, and xf86config
  • untar the 4.0 sources, and cvs -u, and it's all good
  • Why do you keep your thesis in CVS? How many people are working on it at the same time? Smacks of 'any excuse to avoid having to actually sit down and write the thing'!
  • I do the same thing so that I can edit on multiple computers and keep all the copies in sync. It's really quite convenient.

    --

  • Perhaps slashdot should link obscure acronyms to its definition on everything.slashdot.org. One cannot be expected to know ALL of them.
  • Really about time. Now all we need is some more people with write access - giving everyone read access is a very good first step (especially because distributors can finally start including post-release fixes!) - but I don't know if the (few) people with write access can keep track of the numerous patches this will generate.
    (Not doubting their qualification of course, nobody can keep track of 200 patches/day!)

  • Already doing it... (Score:3)

    by otis wildflower ( 4889 ) on Friday June 23, 2000 @06:40AM (#980168) Homepage
    ... check the DRI distro [sourceforge.net], which contains the entire xf4.0 xc/ source tree IIRC.. I've been running latest builds out of that tree on my 2.4.0test1-ac22 built box using my G400M/32 and Quake3.. I get about 5-30 minutes of stable use in 'failsafe' ?dm mode..

    Root around in the site, you'll find CVS instructions...

    Your Working Boy,

  • Re:Thanks SourceForge (Score:3)

    by DeadSea ( 69598 ) on Friday June 23, 2000 @06:43AM (#980169) Homepage Journal
    If you have an open source project written in java, you can get free cvs space at the Giant Java Tree [gjt.org].

    In addition to cvs access the gjt will compile your program, create zip files of your program that can be downloaded. There is a Web based interface to the CVS (a servlet) which you can download and set up elsewhere if you wish.

    There is also a CVS client written in java that I highly recommend for anybody that likes a bit of a GUI for using CVS. It works well under both windows and linux.

    The whole thing is run by Tim Enders, and is simply amazing.

  • Xfree open process. (Score:5)

    by len(*jameson); ( 202702 ) on Friday June 23, 2000 @06:49AM (#980170)
    This is an important step for the Xfree project, however other critical events really need to occur to help this worthy project become more open. For example, what is their policy going to be on CVS commit access? The easiest way to seperate the OSS projects is on the openness of their CVS commit access granting policies.

    Just simple anonymous CVS access isn't going to make that huge a difference in the openness of the project.

  • Although I agree that there are plenty of things on slashdot that are a bit obscure to the uninitialized reader,I don't know if slashdot should be responsible to make the links. I guess the motto is "If you don't understand it, go figure it out". In addition to "everything", there are plenty of resources available such as the Jargon File and the The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (see link below) etc etc.

    CVS is part of the "open source" culture as many "open source" projects use CVS to keep the source to their project. CVS allows many people to check out the source at once, and submit updates. (of course, most projects are of the manner that you have to be trusted first, and the way to be trusted is to submit good patches)

    Anyways, I personally use this link [antiflux.org] which generates a definition for the word you enter from many sources. BTW, Xfree86 CVS'ing the code is great, it means better collabration. I use the JCVS client to access CVS repositories and it is great!

  • But what has OpenAvenue actually done?

    So far, not very much, as far as I can tell. E.g. there have been a lot of patches applied (but not by OpenAvenue people) and there has not been even a development cvs release since 1.10.8, yet there are quite a lot of fixes in the tree since 1.10.8.

    You can read info-cvs here. [egroups.com]

  • Hurrah, someone else notices that Acorn's RISC OS was well ahead of the game on anti-aliasing.

    The quality of anti-aliasing, even on my old ARM 2, beats anything I've seen on Windows.

    And the `font blending' stuff from ~1997 was just the icing on the cake.

    Shame it's dead, really. (and DIG that filer...)

  • Re:CVS maintenance (Score:3)

    by grammar nazi ( 197303 ) on Friday June 23, 2000 @07:03AM (#980174) Journal
    I agree with you David, but I will admit that Conor is right, too. I edit it on multiple computers. My advisor always wants to see the new changes to my thesis. CVS allows me to see what I changed since the last release and only give him the new stuff.

    Although I haven't used it yet, I like the idea of going back to a previous version.

    On a different note, I went to a Engineering Analysis workshop sponsored by HP, and I got the following idea: If you could design an easy to use Web interface for CVS (this alone wouldn't be too hard), then you could sell it to Engineering Dept. Managers and make millions. All the managers at this workshop a) didn't know anything about computers, b) have complicated multi-file engineering projects that their employees are working on (CAD files, Analysis files), and c) are willing to spend big $$$$$ on 'file management solutions'. The powers of CVS and a friendly interface would do the trick.
  • So.. when does TOG decide to merge their changes with xfree86 and release x11r7?

    or ... x12?
  • All they really have to do is develop NDA drivers deperate from the CVS, not much different they they did in the past.
  • I'm in the midst of coding a module for the Olympus Project [mountlinux.com] from Mount Linux [mountlinux.com] that will handle CVS administration. This project is meant to bring all administration for an entire *nix network to a single X desktop and this new development should make it easier. If anyone is interested in helping out on the mod_CVS that I am working on, it is located on Sourceforge [sourceforge.net] under the name Cerberus. Good news all around I guess.
  • The easiest way to seperate the OSS projects is on the openness of their CVS commit access granting policies.

    It might be the easiest way, but it is decidedly not the most relevant way. The openess of a project is reflected in its ease of access to the code, formal methods for patch submission (this doesn't have to mean you can commit your changes), access to the developer community and licensing terms.

    Anonymous CVS access broadens the availability of up to date code, so enhances the openess siginifcantly.

  • I keep my home directory in CVS, which kindof counts.

  • why did they stop linking them to everything2.com? I mean come on, a huge database that has about everything in it, just use the [?] mark after the word

    CVS[?]

  • For a good laugh, go to http://www.soma.com ... Keith
  • Is there a reason you are trying to be a jackass with that .sig? I think we should add something to moderation rules that troll .sigs should be able to be moderated down. Or am I mistaken and you're trying to draw traffic to the Be site?
  • There is a nice web interface available for CVS.

    www.working-dogs.com

  • Yes, but it doesn't have the latest core improvements, just the updated DRI subsystem and drivers - the base code is the same as XF4.0. The XFree86 Group has actually fixed bugs and made some improvemeents to the codebase, which are destined to become part of XF 4.0.1 soon here. (Along with the improved DRI subsystem and drivers.)

  • I've put web sites in CVS -- HTML isn't quite programming. ;-)

    This is particularly useful with SourceForge, where the main way to get your code up to the server is via CVS, but the main way to get your web pages up is via FTP. The moment you have more than one person fixing things on the site at once, FTP hurts

    So I put the web pages in CVS, and added a CGI link that updates the live pages based on the latest version in CVS. All sorts of benefits...



    --Chouser
  • err.. that's not something exactly in critical demand right now. making linux easier to use for newbies is ok i suppose, but why would newbies be coding with CVS?
  • Are you referring to the jCVS client? Lots of people here at work use it, but I think that's mainly because they're on Windoze boxes. But when I show them tkCVS (ftp://ftp.aud.alcatel.com/tcl/NEW/) they're really impressed. It's most useful for viewing branches and stuff, otherwise I just stick to the command line. (this really makes my Windoze coworker's heads spin!)
  • Posted by 11223:

    Anything to draw attention to the platform, and advertize my usage of the best OS there is :-P
  • Actually, my project (chessd) isn't using the sourceforge CVS repository, and with good reason. They don't let you log into the box with the repo itself. Even as the project lead, I still cannot do basic actions on the repsitory. Given the fact that CVS does not cover _all_ possible actions, such as renaming and some directory management, the inability to access the repository locally is a severe crutch. We basically only use sourceforge for web and mailinglists- and half of our webpage is done here at my location. Really the only thing that they provide well that most people don't want to setup themselves are mailing list, and I guess the bug reporting stuff (which we dont' need yet, the list of bugs is managable enough for mailing list)

  • XFree86 opens mailing lists too (Score:3)

    by keithp ( 139560 ) on Friday June 23, 2000 @09:01AM (#980190) Homepage
    Along with CVS access, XFree86 has created new public mailing lists [xfree86.org] for development and support. Existing private lists will remain for NDA'd topics, but there aren't many of those anymore.

  • Re:Already doing it... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Yes, we've been making the DRI work as open as possible since it was added to XFree86. But, we've only been allowed to include the public XFree code and anything we write. Any changes that were made to the private XFree86 tree were not included until the next public snapshot.

    So, this means the entire tree can be open and we can marge to/from XFree more frequently. It is a big step in the right direction.

    - |Daryll (Posting from the Usenix Terminal Room)
  • Now if only the Kernel guys would start using CVS, my life would be complete :)
  • I of course use CVS in the traditional manner for keeping one large project up-to-date. Lately I have begun experimenting with keeping smaller bits of project in separate modules and using cvs co to construct large projects from small modules.

    My CVS repository is somewhat like a source code library in that sense. A project is then simply a collection of CVS modules. Rather than building a binary library full of unrelated code of which only a small subset is used in any one project, I just check out those parts I want for aproject.

    I even have "maketools" and "textools" modules for checking out a build and documentation environment for each project.

    I'm know lots of projects are organized this way on the source level (i.e. Cygnus has common code directories used across projects), but I wonder if anyone else has tried to create these common code directories from a single repository, rather than copying the code into multiple repositories. At the very least, make becomes really fun! :)

    --

  • CVS only works on ASCII text. You'd have to re-implement a lot of the diff'ing to handle CAD file formats.

  • I don't get it... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    How come all the huge and important projects are the most badly organized? Look at Linux, for example; no solid devel/cvs page (at least make an official anon ro cvs access)-- sometimes people ask what needs to be done on the linux-kernel mailing list and then scrape together a free webpage to post the todo list. Now look at XF86; its a good start, but still pretty bare. Why doen't anyone use sourceforge? I'm baffled. Plus, It'd be cool to have linux.sourceforge.net or kernel.sourceforge.net (this one is registered already, but not used at all-- blank everything) for everyone to submit patches to (then maintainers could merge the code) and utilize the forums and a single cvs, so there would not need to be 'ac' patches and so forth. The management features of sourceforge could help to give linux a centralized development base (right now its hell in a basket with the mailing lists. It seems that instead of having mailing lists with hundreds of posts a day, one could use sourceforge's sweet devel resources; what do you think? -Will
  • Then sorry for accusing you of doing otherwise ;)

  • 200 patches/day?

    This is a fact. I remember reading some article that backed it up. If you knew how many bugfix patches and patches that has been applied to XFree86 4.0 after the release I bet you wouldn't want to run it to at least after the first point release...

  • Good point!

    Its funny, sourceforge became wildly successfull (IMHO) in about two weeks. After the third week, slashdot'ers were already bitching about it...
  • One word: BONSAI

    A subset of the functionality provided by bonsai is 'what's changed since', etc.

    HTH

  • Risc OS does it better because it anti-aliases the small fonts, and not the big ones. Windows has it backwards.

    --
    "Where, where is the town? Now, it's nothing but flowers!"
  • I agree with your point (you being a loser), and although I don't generally pay attention to AC posts, I will do you (and anyone else interested) to point you to the jCVS home page [jcvs.org], which provides exactly what you asked for.
  • Hear, hear! Who else is tired of patch -p0 ?
    My respect for Linux would greatly improve if he laid down the badass attitude and added some professionalism to the kernel releases. Enough of this homebrew scheme.
  • Let's see, asking people to support an organization (BeUnited) whose works are all Open Source and a big help to the BeOS community. Yes of course that's trolling! (Of course, it's not Linux related so on /. it might not be too far from the truth.)
  • You cannot expect linux to move entirely to sourceforge since Linux is made from thousands of parts, each one developed by different people in different places etc... remember - Linux is NOT Windows!

    Also, moving everything to sourceforge is definately NOT recommended. What happend if they'll have DoS tommorow? they don't have mirrors on the other coast, or outside U.S - so you actually suggest to put all the eggs in 1 place. Very bad idea (IMHO)
  • The merges are almost done. Calm down..

    pan
  • Guess it's time to put down the coffee and step away from the keyboard :p

    I just want Quake3 to stop crashing... ;)

    Keep up the good work!

    Your Working Boy,
  • Beware of the 4.0 release.. I don't think the tags will match exactly correctly.

    pan
  • I think maybe you confused my .sig as being part of my post? I was talking about XFree86. At least I think I was. Maybe I need to take my pills now...
  • No, no, no. LSD is for enlightenment. XTC/E is not to be used with a CVS, although it can be used with a LSD, IIRC, YMMV.
    --
  • If you consider the windows line to be the same OS, then you need help. Windows NT is a 32 bit microkernel OS with roots in VAX.
    Windows 95 is a 24 bit (mix of 16 and 32 bit) OS with roots in DOS. One supports DirectX, the other doesn't. One has modern features like asynchronus I/O and the other doesn't. Also, it isn't exactly a great honor be the third fastest growing desktop OS, considering that #1 and #2 are hugely far ahdead of #3. Lastly, this isn't about Linux. If X dies now, the effects won't be felt too terribly (servers don't have much use for X, and Linux isn't on that many desktops yet.) If people wait longer to kill X, we'll be stuck with a system whose capabilities still don't beat Windows GDI, much less a modern system's. If Win 3.0 were killed early and people had moved to OS/2, I think the computing world would have been much happier.
  • I'd like to see you back up that 200 patches/day "fact". As someone who sees all the patches submitted to XFree86, I can assure you that it is nowhere near 200/day. Not even 200/month. Allow me to spoil a good argument with some real facts. For the month of May 2000, between 50 and 60 patches were submitted by registered XFree86 developers, and about 12 were submitted by others. As anyone can now see, the CHANGELOG post-4.0 has 370 entries right now, an average of 92 per month. Many of these are for things committed directly by developers with CVS commit access, and not submitted as patches.
  • The 4.0 source tarballs at ftp.xfree86.org should match the xf-4_0 tag. After all, they were created from the same checked out tree used to tag 4.0.

    The binaries on XFree86's ftp site largely match the xf-4_0-bindist tag.

  • Does anyone know if it is currently possible (with Xfree 4.0) to change color depth/resolution without restarting X? I know you can change resolution, and have been able to forever, but it doesn't help if your virtual console size is 4x larger then your real size :). So whats the deal, has no one just writting a X tool to change color depth/resolution properly or is it just something X can't do?
  • If you'd actually used xf86config, you wouldn't be considering it a setup program. :P

    The XF86Config file that it spat out for me had to undergo lots of manual editing before it was usable.

    But now I'm back on 3.3.6 (or is it 3.3.7?) anyway, because Mandrake mangled the Voodoo3 driver in their release of XFree86 4.0.
    --
    No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.
  • Theoretically, there is NO reason why you couln't maintain your own on SourceForge.. just download the patches as they come out, patch your local kernel, and cvs commit into your SourceForge tree.

    If you do, be sure to tell us ;)
  • Speaking of which, has Mozilla every gotten around to creating a sane installer for bonsai/tinderbox/bugzilla/etc.? Last time I checked, installation required lots of code hacking. I have enough hacking to do on tools to debug other tools without fixing tools to manage the hacking of other tools :)

    --

  • Isn't sourceforge inspired by all these BSD projects which have always used CVS?

  • BSD (Score:1)

    by dcs ( 42578 )
    'nugh said.
  • Probably sooner than Microsoft will enter the 20th century and give us remote displays :)

    Remote displays such as the Windows Terminal Server [microsoft.com] displays?

  • Then use the standard (RFC something) way of indicating a sig, "\n-- \n" (a C style string,
    of course.)
  • Now when will it move into the 21st century and give us anti-aliasing?

    Perhaps if and when the new rendering model discussed in this paper by Keith Packard [xfree86.org], from USENIX 2000, is implemented; the paper suggests a number of enhancements to the X rendering model, including, but not limited to, anti-aliased fonts (alpha compositing; alpha-blending operations to improve, I infer, anti-aliasing of images; 32-bit coordinates with 8-bits of sub-pixel positioning; a fancier rendering primitive to draw objects out of trapezoids - see the article for a detailed explanation, I'm not a graphics expert; better text support, including access by the application to more information about the font such as pair kerning tables and raw outline data and metrics).

    The paper doesn't say when this will happen, but I infer that this isn't just a wish list; Packard is, according to his page on the XFree86 Web site [xfree86.org], working for SuSE on X.

  • That was a joke. As in ha ha. As in funny... I know 16bit and 32bit don't make 24bit I was trying to make a joke. Some people...
  • 200 patches a day! Wow man, Xfree86 must be the Internet! Cool. I'm gunna join and send in patches too.
  • Are you employed by XiGraphics man? What kind of slander is this for an Open Source project. I think your real name is Bill Gates :-(
  • YOu see the patches, but man do you patch? I mean are you applying anything? I mean I'm gonna join and I'm gonna patch.
  • Yeah that's news to me. Where are you primarily writing to? Xpert....I went there you're the only one! What is this a masturbation site?
  • just means that I misread the damn thing... like that time I posted something about Microsoft in a forum that had nothing to do with M$ because the story that did have something to do with M$ was taken out....

  • "it increases performance (especially over a network)"

    I highly doubt that sending already rasterized anti-aliased text over a network can be more efficient than just sending the text and letting the client render the text anti-aliased. Particularly since most new PC's will be able to do the anti-aliasing in hardware.

  • Sorry for the off-topic question, but I have searched far and wide and cannot seem to find a decent free Win32 X Server (no I don't mean the Win32 box runs as a server, I mean, you run the X server on your Win32 box and let client apps running on your Linux box connect to it .. anyway)

    Currently I use VNC (http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/, a free cross-platform PC-anywhere type program), which works very well as a solution to my problem, but it isn't really an X server.

  • This is X we're talking about - the server is the thing running on the local machine, while the clients are the things that are displayed on the server. Server-side anti-aliasing would allow the hardware to be used, whereas clients should know nothing about the underlying hardware as much as possible.
  • XFree 4.0 supports multiple colour models (or whatever they're called in X-speak) on a single display. So you can have clients happily using 8-bit indexed colour and 24-bit direct colour on the same display. As for resolution, I'm not sure I see the problem.

  • <slaps self on forehead> doh! Of course .. my mistake. I knew that of course (in fact I iterated that specific point in another post of mine that I posted on Saturday) but I still get confused sometimes :)

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