XFree86 10 Years Old

ChazeFroy writes "XFree86 is now 10 years old. To quote from the page, 'What makes this particularly eventful is that it is fully backwards compatible; this is a true testament to the spirit of the original X protocol of which XFree86 is its finest implementation.'" Ten years and still binary compatible. Very cool.

Sure, but...

[NetRanger]

...it still doesn't have Albert Einstein helping you search for files on your computer. You call this advancement!?!

"X"Free86

[popeyethesailor]

Now the X has another meaning :)

Re:Seems a bit... odd

[spectecjr]

The idea here is that X has efficiently managed to maintain full backwards compatibility efficiently.

... by not really adding anything new in the last 10 years.

;-)

Si

Nothing compared to mother nature

[Jugalator]

Men and women have lived in millions of years and we're still compatible. Ain't that cool? Mother nature must have been a heck of a designer.

Re:Nothing compared to mother nature

[Galvatron]

How do you know? Have you gone back to 1 million BC and tried impregnating a cavewoman? No? Then you don't really know if we're backwards compatible or not. Besides, there's been far less design improvement in that amount of time for humans than there has been for XFree86

More

[Anonymous Coward]

I loved early X.

First of all, it allowed me to bombard my testicles with 1 gigawatt/sec of abnormal radiation whilst I frantically rummaged through old manuals looking for the hertz values of the Y-axis of my monitor.

Oh wait! No got it! No! Yes! No! No!

Not only has it rendered my sperm inert, it has rendered the rest of me inert, too.

I was the director of business dev at a failed dotcom, so I'm not entirely sure what portion of me was inert at any one time during the crucial "growth phase" of my company or when my monitor was transforming my DNA on a daily basis.

But! I lived to tell about it.

Re:Nothing compared to mother nature

[Begemot]

My wife would argue, she claims that the only thing I'm compatible with is my comp.

Relevant quote

[halk]

"Mach is the biggest intellectual fraud of the last decade."
"Really, not X-Windows?"
"I said 'intellectual'."
-- overheard in Silicon Valley

"Me too"

[MarkusQ]

Well done man, getting modded as insightful for admitting that you have been asleep for 6 years ;)

Hey, I nodded off a lot. Can I have a point too?

-- MarkusQ

P.S. I'm shooting for Funny but I'll take Insightfull if that's all you've got.

Re:X sucks :)

[Bazman]

You dont have to deal with several hundred students using Xterminals...

- it's flexible, meaning each of our lecturers wants the students to use a different window manager, and the students edit their .xsession and window manager configs until I haven't a clue what does what and can't help them sort out problems.

- it's network portable, which means our students could be using machines on the other side of the world and running netscape on that and then complaining to me that it's running slowly and I cant tell they are running it on foo.bar.au

- it's cross platform, meaning whatever machine someone has on their desk, they want a copy of it installed! Grrr! There's nothing a BOFH hates more than having someone want some software!

- it allows you to run a screensaver as background, using up CPU cycles that the rest of our students would like to use for statistical analyses! killall -9 xscreensaver!

- it's free, which means I cant use our budget as an excuse to not get it so I dont have to install it, thus creating more work for me!

No, I love it really. X is fantastic. Here's to X more years!

Baz

Re:Nothing compared to mother nature

[kzinti]

Men and women have lived in millions of years and we're still compatible.

What the fsck are you talking about? Yes, we may be compatible at the lowest Physical layer, but for those same millions of years you speak of, we (men) have also been trying to reverse engineer their (women's) higher-level protocols. We've barely broken the Data-Link layer and even our understanding there is only minimal. Compatible? We can barely keep our sockets connected. Hell, the last time I tried to ping my wife she gave me a protocol mismatch error! My Session layer with my her has been working reasonably well for many years now, but you ought to see the Presentation layer break down, especially on birthdays and anniversaries! I'm afraid, my friend, that we've got a long way to go to achieve full compatibility.

--Jim

What's in it for me?

[Jupiter9]

I want 3 of those 10 years back for wasting so much time trying to get my XF86Config file to work right.

Re:Nothing compared to mother nature

[martinflack]

Hell, the last time I tried to ping my wife she gave me a protocol mismatch error!

Maybe shes's getting a DOS attack from another source. :-P

Re:Much more importantly

[Paul Komarek]

I remember. A friend had a blazing fast (and rare) 486 DX50, and I convinced him (which wasn't hard) to try linux with X on it. My 386 SX20 was too slow, and probably too incompatible since it was from Packard Bell. There was an application called Xroach which put lots of beetles on your screen that scurried for the shelter of your windows. When you closed a window, they'd scurry somewhere else. We were really impressed at the number of small but nifty apps available. As computers got faster, the beetles of Xroach turned into blurry streaks of black; I don't think anyone ever bothered slowing it down, and I haven't seen it since.

I have an Infomagic CD collection with a 1995 copyright which contains a very small leaflet outlining slackware installation. Section 9 is titled

X11 Configuration Cookbook -- How to Get X
Running Under Linux (without calling the fire
department)

Later they go on to say "Thus it is possible to overdrive the horizontal synch. of most monitors and cause *damage* or even *fire*. (Yes, they WILL burst into flames...it has happened!)".

I was truly and eternally impressed. =-)

-Paul Komarek

Re:Much more importantly

[Gulthek]

Or when, as my brother tells me, the instructions to connecting your monitor told you with no trace of irony to grab the nearest occilloscope to determine frequency timings.

Re:X kicks ass, XFree86 doubly so.

[DrXym]

Sorry, but it shouldn't require 40Mb of binaries (not including fonts, man pages etc. or the WM on top of that) to make GNOME or KDE run. That's what XFree86 requires.

Microwindows demonstrates that it is quite feasible to produce something with the right kind of functionality required but considerably less overhead. That is what KDE & GNOME should be running on, a lightweight, local desktop. If someone wants remote they can run XFree86 in rootless mode, but a lot of people won't care about that.

And yes, it must be possible to produce an equivalent feature set simply because Win32 & Mac both manage to have fast desktops despite not using X at all.

Re:Much more importantly

[Arandir]

Who cares about speed? I'm going to launch these suckers on everyone with an open display :-)

Re:X kicks ass, XFree86 doubly so.

[bonch]

"If you're having problems with Linux (or *BSD) with 96 Megs, it sounds like you need to fix your configuration somewhere."

So I'm constantly told. ;-) But I don't have the time to search for the configuration problem--so I'll just use what already works.