X.org X11 Server Release 6.8 463
kormoc writes "The developers of X.org have just release the long-desired version 6.8.0. This release brings real translucency and allows one to set values on different windows. Also, nifty drop shadows as well as XDamage, an extention that limits redrawing of windows to only the areas that were damaged. The Xcomposite extention is still not stable, but it works well for some people. Why not give it a shot?"
Re:Release notes (Score:4, Informative)
as in 6.8.0
composite rules! (Score:5, Informative)
In order to use the composite extension i had to add:
Section "Extensions" Option "Composite" "Enable" EndSection
and
Option "RenderAccel" "true"
to my nvidia driver section of my xorg.conf file
then install xcompmgr to turn it on since kwin doesn't utilise it yet.
Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows? (Score:5, Informative)
What is it with drop shadows?
They're something that's easy to define, work well in MacOSX and Windows XP, and don't work very well in (some) current X11 servers. So obviously, you're going to get loads of graphics geeks rushing to fix it.
That said, the drop shadows in KDE on XFree86 look fine to me already.
Re:Wrong link- try this one (Score:5, Informative)
Gentoo fans (Score:5, Informative)
Screenshots (Score:5, Informative)
http://ruinaudio.com/Xorg-xcompmgr.png [ruinaudio.com]
http://jserv.sayya.org/misc/matchbox-gcin.png [sayya.org]
http://jserv.sayya.org/misc/matchbox-xcomposite4.
http://img3.exs.cx/img3/6458/screen_lynucs_175940
Translucency screenshots
http://freedesktop.org/~mallum/argb.png [freedesktop.org]
http://freedesktop.org/~krh/Screenshot.png [freedesktop.org]
Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows? (Score:5, Informative)
I've five iTerms going right now (yeah, MacOS X). They're all the same colour yet I can easily see where they intersect *and* I can see the text below through the shadow. It's an efficiency thing ...
Re:Is it as good as Citrix? (Score:1, Informative)
All i miss in this solution is audio
NVIDIA (nv) driver enhancements (Score:5, Informative)
The nv driver for NVIDIA cards has been updated as follows:
* Support added to the nv driver for the GeForce FX 5700, which didn't work with XFree86 4.3.
* The driver now does a much better job of auto-detecting which connector of dual output cards the monitor is attached to, and this should reduce or eliminate the need for manual xorg.conf overrides.
* The 2D acceleration for TNT and GeForce has been completely rewritten and its performance should be substantially improved.
* TNT and GeForce cards have a new Xv PutImage adaptor which does scaled YUV bit blits.
http://freedesktop.org/~xorg/X11R6.7.0/doc/RELNOT
Re:not stable ? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:how much of this is affecting X11 *the* protoco (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Double standards (Score:2, Informative)
No. X.Org release a piece of software that includes some experimental extensions which may not work correctly for all users (hence them being experimental). Also, these extensions are switched off by default.
Re:yum? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Debian (Score:5, Informative)
Previous long lead times, according the Brandon (Debian's X release manager) were brokenness on some of the platforms Debian supports about which the developers in power didn't care, as well as reams of patches they wouldn't accept (like ones from ATI supporting "new" cards that weren't accepted after 6 months).
The whole point of FreeDesktop was to help everyone coordinate so that the process could be smoother. Most of the poeple on both sides were fed up with the politics and are working to make that the reality now.
Re:Gentoo! (Score:5, Informative)
When that is said, the latest release, the 904 drop, compiled in 21 minutes on my machine and has been running perfectly fine for a few days. Ofcourse, I'm running an AMD64 based machine. Your "joke" is actually true if you run a P1 160Mhz box, then it will take weeks to compile
Re:Having both both "nvidia" and "nv" in xorg.conf (Score:2, Informative)
That way you could switch between drivers without having to edit your xorg.conf file. That's been possible for a while.
you'd specify a default layout and a alternative layout (call it unaccl for example) and go like this:
startx
if that doesn't work then go:
startx -- -layout unaccl
there are examples on the web if you look around. I use one setup for my dual screen, but some games don't like that, so I have a second layout for just one screen.
Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers. (Score:2, Informative)
/Mikael
Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers. (Score:5, Informative)
The
I believe there was a prototype windowing system called W that preceeded X, but that's now ancient history (the first X Window System implementation to run was in the mid 1980s).
Re:Debian (Score:2, Informative)
Changing stuff like this around (mainly, all the package renames, as well as a mass patch rediff) within Debian is actually really quite difficult, and very, very unlikely to be allowed to happen before sarge's release.
I'll leave it you to draw consequences. All I know is that news was spread Sarge will come around september this year (on debianplanet on aug.2), but then again: Debian releases when it is time. (from debian.org)
Anyways, since I'm a long-ago Debian man, I also hope X.org will come to us soon.
Re:how much of this is affecting X11 *the* protoco (Score:5, Informative)
Having said that, the presence of the new ARGB visuals is known to confuse and break some programs. Worryingly, Mozilla+Flash and GTK 1.2 apps (like XMMS, VMware, etc) are amongst the things that have apparently broken.
To "unbreak" them you need to set a magic environment variable but as of yet there is no automatic blacklisting mechanism in place for userspace apps so .... you just have to be able to diagnose this breakage yourself.
Hence the fact that it's described as unstable.
Xorg roadmap (Score:4, Informative)
Looking at the Xorg release plan (closest I could find to a roadmap) at http://wiki.freedesktop.org/XOrg/XorgReleasePlan
Anyone aware?
Another thing that would be neat to see is integration of the GLX/DRM work on the S3 Savage line of chips. According to the DRI page there's some work being done on this, though it's not ready for prime time. My laptop has a Savage, and my Mom's computer uses the Via KM133, which has an imbedded Savage. Of course this is an area where perhaps I *should* be trying to help.
Re:Screw the eye candy, where is the integration? (Score:5, Informative)
What's wrong with ssh (besides the occasional "oops, wrong machine" moments
"When will we see some innovation instead of eye candy?"
In case you missed the point, this is about innovation, eye candy is just a nice side-effect. For example, XDamage improves X over slower network connections.
"The hooks for modular gui plugins should be there"
You mean something like the extensions for X?
"Why not work on something to compete against microsofts new gui/api interffaces based upon 3d rendering instead of pixel rendering? why not kill 2d before the competition and work on an graphical interface that is competitive instead of intriguing."
Well, it would be time to make up your mind on eye-candy.
3D desktops so far were nothing but neat eye-candy, from a usability point of view they have added nothing (one can argue that in fact they are worse than 2D ones). But anyway, I had the impression that the people of X.org are working on something like that.
If you want something to change, help them - but first, please, get your facts right, because spewing uninformed bullshit on slashdot does not help anyone.
Re:What?! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Translucency (Score:3, Informative)
Simple, really.
Re:Screw the eye candy, where is the integration? (Score:5, Informative)
When can we see a trusted computing environment?
SELinux integration with the X server (SE-X) to allow you to lock applications down tighter is being worked on in a branch of Xorg CVS. It's not done yet AFAIK. The idea here is that you can take the features of "trusted" military-strength windowing systems where it's possible to have secure windows such that you cannot screenshot them, other apps cannot send events to them and so on.
When will we see fully improved network/remote access?
This statement is meaningless but NX compression is clearly the way forward here.
When will we see some innovation instead of eye candy?
Again, totally useless statement. Nowhere do you define "innovation" or even show that it's a good thing (hint: I'll take an efficient and usable desktop over and pointlessly innovative one any day).
The hooks for modular gui plugins should be there - just as with any gui. OS/2 had the object based interface, windows has the pretty indepth theme integration and OSX has the PDF display..
Again a meaningless statement. There are actually some pretty convincing arguments out there that DPDF/DPS type systems are the wrong way to implement a graphics system, and that XRENDER type trapezoid rendering is the right way. I suggest you investigate first.
Windows XP has themes - great. You realise that Linux has pioneered the way when it comes to theming? It was the first to have a totally themable desktop (I think this is true even if you include gross hacks like WindowBlinds), still the only OS to have systematic icon theming, the only one I know of that has mouse cursor theming etc.
Why not work on something to compete against microsofts new gui/api interffaces based upon 3d rendering instead of pixel rendering?
I think you've misunderstood what Avalon is. It's not about 3D GUIs, it may include using 3D acceleration to speed up rendering on machines that support it but this doesn't affect the APIs.
Quick release cycles don't do anything for corporate adoption. Give us the "killer app" - in this case a desktop/windowing system that delivers everything we seem to bash in other systems as insecure or proprietary.
I don't know of any other open, standardised windowing system with the security features X has. If you can show me one, I'd be interested.
Re:Is it as good as Citrix? (Score:5, Informative)
Fabian Franz: In fact, our FreeNX implementation is only the last piece of the mosaic. 99,9% comes from NoMachines's GPL/NX components, that we simply use unchanged in FreeNX.
[...}
Kurt Pfeifle: In the last 15 months, there have been servere misunderstandings concerning the whole NX software, which was considered to be "non-Free" by several Open Source developers, just because NoMachine also based its commercial products on top of it.
Without having a deeper look, rejecting NX as "practically unusable, if only the libraries are released under the GPL whereas the NoMachine NX Server remains proprietary". These biases simply overlooked, that a commandline tool was shipped by NoMachine almost from the beginning, including the source code which allowed everyone who was interested to build an completely working NX tunnel.
[...]
Fabian Franz: Our implemementation was intentionally kept simple. It's a simple Bash script...
You are surprised? Yeah, right: FreeNX Server is a Bash script, which glues together GPL library and executable components of NX to a working whole. All that stuff existed for 15 months untouched.
The fact that it is Bash means that every Linux developer can fix errors in our FreeNX server.
Kurt Pfeifle: I was merely a mentor for the FreeNX development and I do the documentation. But I can confirm: Fabian isn't lying...
FreeNX consists of less than 500 lines of Bash code (additionally to the NoMachine/NX source code parts, which are under the GPL).
Fabian did the implementation of the FreeNX server all by himself. First of all, Fabian is a true Bash wizard.
Secondly, this implementation should prove how "complete" the GPL components of the NX are already since 15 months.
So, i'd be guessing anyone from Gnome can code that up in a couple of days as well, there really isn't a whole lot of magic here.
Re:composite rules! (Score:5, Informative)
The first, and biggest reason (as far as I know) is that modern Linux widget toolkits are doing a lot more work than the Windows widget toolkit is.
For instance, full UTF-8/unicode rendering support combined with containment based layout, along with stock clipart using an alpha channel which is all double buffered simply requires more CPU time than a positional based toolkit which doesn't really support alpha-blended images (or indeed, stock artwork at all), flickers constantly and whos i18n support is patchy at best.
These are features which are useful and you don't want to lose. They make the GUI look great due to having professional artwork, smooth when resizing (internally), support users from all cultures and mean that resizable windows which react properly to font size changes are the norm not the exception like on Windows.
There are other issues. The focus of most Linux developers has not been optimization as of yet, as development effort has been concentrating on filling in the missing pieces (like HAL) and on catching up with the competition (this sort of X work). As an example I think Xrender and therefore font renderning had some serious bottlenecks until recently. There are a few notable exceptions. Soeren Sandmann for instance has been working on optimizing Linux graphics and GTK for some time now, and has been doing a great job.
Then there are scheduling/kernel issues. Con Kolivas mentioned some issues with respect to scheduling lately, I forget exactly what, but he seemed to think some change in the X server could allow the 2.6 scheduler to do a much better job. Also last time I checked the kernel did not expose vertical retrace intervals to the X server.
Finally there are issues within the toolkits themselves. GTK+ seems to really suck at rapidly responding to Expose events. I'm not sure why. However on COMPOSITE enabled machines this isn't an issue as everything is double-buffered at the server level anyway so time taken to react to Expose events isn't a factor. Just try the new distros if/when they come out with compositing enabled - they will feel a lot faster due to this change alone, assuming you have enough memory.
Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers. (Score:3, Informative)
The X Windowing System was originally an MIT project for unix (not linux specifically, it works with linux because linux carries on with the unix specification) that was made open source and turned into open source. X is just the name of the system, the 11 is the current version of the specification. 11 has been active since 1988.
The XFree86 organization managed the X-Window-System until version v4.3. Earlier this year, though, they released v4.4 under a license that was thought incompatible with the GPL, which caused a split. Alot of politics went on and alot of people got angry, which caused the birth of the X.Org foundation, which is now industry backed and also backed now by most major distributions such as Slackware (I think they were the first?) and Mandrake, Redhat, Gentoo. Others such as Debian still use XFree86 v4.3 instead of updating to 4.4.
The first version of X.Org was version 6.7 (which carried on the MIT X versioning system), which was released on March 31 this year. Now X11R6.8 has been released, carrying along again with the numbering system.
I hope that explains it for you.
Does Quake3 work over a network? (Score:1, Informative)
Just tested again, but my memory was right: Of course it works over a network! With hardware acceleration.
I played both via ssh-forwarding (which is a bit slow, because of the compression, but is otherwise perfect) and via normal X protocol (only the XF86VidModeClientNotLocal calls failed (which is a _security_ thing apparently), so it was in a frameless window and not gamma corrected, but really fast enough).
One of the reasons SGI even invented OpenGL, was to get the network transparency right. Its predecessor gl had beed designed for local hardware data transfers and got network forwarding implanted in a somewhat ugly way.
Re:X is slow? (Re:composite rules!) (Score:4, Informative)
"Single window" Citrix.. (Score:4, Informative)
You simply "publish" a single application specify that its 'seamless', and run it as a single window.. no 'citrix desktop' required..
We do it every day now, with hundreds of clients...
Re:Why do people care so much about drop shadows? (Score:5, Informative)
Shadows and transparencies are just one of the things which you can do with all those toys, but the fact that the pieces behing them are there is what matters, using the hardware to do all this, etc. As a plus, shadows and transparencies are nice (I'd like to have them even in the light window managers at least). I don't know why people is so concerned about "shadows are not useful". This is a win-win situation, no drawbacks.
Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers. (Score:1, Informative)
Evidently the answers weren't all that clear to you. X is a protocol, not a program. It was designed from the start as a client/server display protocol. The programs that implement X are called an X server and an X client.
(Somewhat confusingly, an X Server is a program that generally resides on a network client, and an X Client is an application that is often, but not necessarily, on a network server.)
At work, we run X Servers on our Windows desktops to run GUI apps that exist on our Solaris servers.
And how about differences between XFree.org and X.org ?
Two different implementations of the X protocol. Specifics have already been answered in this thread.
And OpenWindows ? Are they three implementations of functions (same ".h"s) for displaying windows and drawing things ?
Plain X, by itself, is pretty boring. The windows, for example, don't have any of the trim you expect from a modern GUI. This is where window managers come in. One of the nice things about X is that it is decoupled from the window manager and therefore you have many choices. OpenWindows is the window manager Solaris has used for years (personally, I've never liked it). More information on window managers can be found here [xwinman.org].
Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers. (Score:4, Informative)
Anyone can implement an X server that adheres to the X11R6 protocol (and several UNIX vendors have; in the closed-source UNIX world Sun has their own implementation, and I bet all the others have too, although they may be based on the reference implementation - the old X Consortium X server). In the open source world, we have two implementations (which are very similar but now diverging - the XFree server and the X.Org server)
I don't know the historic reasons for why X was designed because I was only a small child in 1986 (I dare say somewhere on the Internet has the story as to why it was made in the way it was), but separating the client and the server like they have is extremely useful - the client doesn't care where the X server is or what the X server is. It means the client is well decoupled from the implementation of the X server - an X client running on HP/UX will display correctly on an X.Org X server running on Linux and you don't need to worry about DLL hell to make it all work - it just works. It's a very clean design and that's one of the reasons it's lasted so long.
As for the different implementations, X clients (i.e your programs) aren't linked to the X server or its header files. OpenWindows could be a radically different internal design with no header files in common with X.Org's server. What the clients link to is not the X server's header files - but XLib. XLib implements the client part of the deal, including the header files a C programmer would use. And XLib isn't linked to the X Server - it implements the X protocol (and that's why a Linux program written with Vendor A's xlib will work fine with Vendor B's X server running on some completely different architecture).
Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers. (Score:5, Informative)
The fundamental design of X is different than say, MS Windows. It is always network-based. We have to talk about a network protocol because that is how every X client program communicates, even locally. It's not just an optional feature. Its the entire design.
In MS Windows, you write a program that calls functions in a
The difference is that every application that runs on X communicates over a "network". Whether you are opening Firefox on your own desktop or running an application on a remote server thousands of miles away, the application you are running connects to your X server and sends drawing commands over the "network". There is never any direct link to drawing code like there is in Windows - all commands pass over the "network". Of course if the application is local, optimizations are in place to make this communication very fast and not pass through the OS's networking stack.
This lets you do a very neat thing: Every graphical X-based program you have on your linux desktop can be run on any other X server. I'm not talking about just the few special ones that support it or link some special library. I mean every single program. Since you have to use the network even if you are running locally, to run on a remote server you just tell it to use a different IP address for the display. This is true network computing. The display is just an IP address and a port/desktop number.
Download an X server for your MS Windows desktop. Then log in to a Sun/Linux/BSD/etc box and you can run most any X application. There are a very small number of exceptions (like a program that requires an extention that your X server does not have, I.E. OpenGL for Quake3), but those are very rare.
In many ways, X is the most conceptually advanced and "network aware" desktop display system, despite being designed in the 1980s. Unfortunately, it is also painfully old in a lot of ways and painfully lacking in other, non-networking areas. The concept is really great and it works pretty well, but it would be nice to have a crack at redesigning the protocol based on other advances in computing. But failing that, I'm really glad that X.org is pushing things along and modernizing. The XFree86.org team had basically stalled out in a quagmire of politics and a need to cling to the past.
Re:Screenshots (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers. (Score:3, Informative)
Aside from advanced support for 3D accelerators, what's really missing out of X as it is now?
A Guide to X Composite and its eye candy (Score:4, Informative)
Re:NVIDIA (nv) driver enhancements (Score:3, Informative)
I've used the nv driver before, and the 2d performance wasn't that bad.
Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers. (Score:5, Informative)
But why do we talk about a "protocol" ? Isn't X a program for displaying stuff ?
Nope. X is a protocol [x.org] for sending drawing requests. An X server is a program for displaying stuff.
I know we can use remote display on a network with X, but why isn't it only a feature? Why is X so focused on network terminology?
Some features are just minor tweaks to a basic design that could exclude them, other features are fundamental to the design. Network transparency is fundamental to the design of X. Even when you're not using a remote display, you're always using the X protocol, but over UNIX sockets rather than TCP sockets.
And how about differences between XFree.org and X.org ? And OpenWindows ? Are they three implementations of functions (same ".h"s) for displaying windows and drawing things?
They're all programs that receive drawing requests in X protocol messages and then do their best to fulfill the requests by drawing stuff on a display. XFree86 and X.org are mostly the same codebase as well, but that's not really relevant to their functions as X servers. There are lots of other X servers around like OpenWindows, Hummingbird EXceed, MetroLink, Xi Graphics, XVision, and bunches more. Pretty much any X client application can use any of these X servers, locally or remotely, to display windows and draw things. Some X servers have more features than others, some have better performance than others, some support more graphics cards than others, but all implement the same standard protocol so they're all to some degree interchangeable.
But you asked about differences, not similarities.
Those are some examples of X servers and how they differ from one another. There are many, many more, particularly in the commercial X server space, but they all work with all X clients, locally or remotely, and the common thread that binds them all together is the X protocol.
Re:Gentoo! (Score:3, Informative)
I run Gentoo at home on an Athlon XP, dual Athlon MP, powerbook 17", and an AMD64 box, as well as at work on everything from old Pentium 2/400s to dual Opteron 246s. Xorg is now the default xserver on all those platforms. No special hoops required: 'emerge xorg-x11' is all that is required. With my Nvidia card I use nvidia's 64bit binary-only drivers, with the others, I use the free ATI drivers and dri (I have older ATI 9100 cards).
I haven't yet tried to emerge xorg 6.8.0 (still awaiting the ebuild to do so), but I suspect all that will be required is adding 'x11-base/xorg-x11 ~amd64' to my
My experience with installing difficult software, such as cinelerra, transcode, etc. is that, in all the distributions I've used over the years (and I've used most of the big ones), gentoo's portage makes installation by far the easiest. Of course, the downside is the installation time
Re:Debian (Score:4, Informative)
They have stated that they will not move to x.org until the modular version is available. Apparently it would take a lot of work to modify assumptions made in the apt-get respositories and they don't feel that the current release of x.org justifies the effort. Debian does acknowledge, however, that x.org is the future.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-x/2004/05/msg004
I am making the assumption the x.org's X11R6.8 is still a part of the monolithic tree.
More information here:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-x/2004/06/m
Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers. (Score:3, Informative)
Talking of games - the fundamental network design of X and the display program being the X server (essentially a daemon) means my Windows-using ET playing friends are envious of how I play the game in Linux. I simply start up a second X server. That's all there is to having two entirely separate desktops on one machine. Just start another desktop. The clients (such as my game) don't even have to be aware of this functionality - they just display to unix:1 instead of unix:0, as set in the DISPLAY environment variable. I can hot key between the two desktops with Ctrl-Alt-F7 and Ctrl-Alt-F8, so I can run ET in fullscreen and easily flick back to IRC.
Re:Archaic build (Score:1, Informative)
When will XOrg appear in Debian GNU/Linux? (Score:2, Informative)
Application Publishing (Score:3, Informative)
This gives you the ability to launch any application from a secure web page, giving the appearance that its running on your local machine, with all the advantages of clustering of your applications on the 'big boxes' back in the server room. You also get a really low network profile, ICA/RDP is pretty network friendly. And the client is multiplatform
Before Nfuse, the admin would stick items in your start-menu for you.... you click on "word", and poof, word appears.. The user never knows the difference.. ( this can still be done, but they are pushing the 'portal product' like everyone else these days..
You can still publish a complete desktop for Winterm type users..
And yes, to answer your question, dialogs and pop ups are in separate windows.. this is NOT some 'desktop hack'..
You can also have stateless or statefull connections.. Something raw X is not too great about, you loose your connection, your app/desktop closes..
You might try to get a chance to take a look at their products, you might be pleasantly surprised.. they are however, really damned expensive... I only have worked with the windows based products, since 'winframe', but I guess they also have the same sort of product based on Solaris too..
Re:NO T JUST EYE CANDY!!! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Screenshots (Score:3, Informative)
http://home.centurytel.net/jacob002/xorg-mplayer.
http://home.centurytel.net/jacob002/metacity-comp
http://home.centurytel.net/jacob002/skippy-xd.jpg [centurytel.net]
http://albin.abo.fi/~jfors/images/saya-20040830-1
http://members.arstechnica.com/x/ioslipstream/mil
http://home.comcast.net/~amsilveira/screenshots/0
http://www.rpi.edu/~penwan/ss-20040829.png [rpi.edu]
http://home.pacbell.net/elomire/screenshot.png [pacbell.net]
http://thorin.battleaxe.net/~prototyped/kde33.png [battleaxe.net]
http://members.arstechnica.com/x/treatment/Screen
http://home.centurytel.net/jacob002/xorg-glxgears
http://www.arslinux.com/~jorge/screenshots/xorg.p
http://home.centurytel.net/jacob002/xorg-transvid
Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers. (Score:2, Informative)
So, Bob took a copy of a Unix port of the "W" window system (written for the V kernel) that Chris Kent had done with Paul Asente at Stanford, changed it from be synchronous to asynchronous, and dubbed it "X" (from then on, we teased him that we'd never let him name anything again :-).
The early version of the X protocol (up through X10) were focused on fixing various things that came up as the system was ported to different architectures. Initially, the design center was referred to as "3M": 1 megapixel, 1 MIPS, and 1 megabyte.
The X server was quickly ported to a variety of workstations, to DOS, and to terminals. At the time, it was one of the few places where warring companies came together to bring a little bit of unity.
Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers. (Score:3, Informative)
Remember that Jim Gettys was one of the original designers of X from its inception; he's REALLY BIG on backward compatibility, and wants to still be able to proudly declare that 2004's X clients will still display properly on a 1987 MicroVAX running the same protocol.
Re:Help ! I'm all mixed up with X version numbers. (Score:3, Informative)
X is the name of the windowing-system project invented at MIT in the 1980's. It was the successor to 'W' (stood for 'Window').
X.org, formerly the X Consortium, a bunch of industry-types (HP, Dell, DEC, IBM), tasked with developing X.
XFree86.org started as a port of the X code to PCs, and for much of the late 1990's and early 2000's, was the standard-bearer of X development.
Freedesktop.org is an umbrella project for *NIX GUI development.
At MIT, X went through several incompatible protocol versions, culminating at X11. Version 11 of the X protocol is what most servers speak today. MIT then formed the X consortium, which continued to develop X.
At some point in the early 1990s, what would become XFree86 forked from the X Consortium code, and was intended as a distribution for PCs.
The X Consortium and XFree86 continued make releases, and merged code between them periodically. At some point, the X Consortium was renamed X.org. X.org releases went up to X11R6.6. XFree86 releases, which maintained their own version number, went up to XFree86 4.4 (4.3 corresponded roughly to the X11R6.6 code). During this time, XFree86 was the primary developer of X11.
After a license change at XFree86, and concerns about it's slow pace of development, X.org and freedesktop.org forked the XFree86 4.4 code (just prior to the license change), and released X11R6.7. X11R6.8 is the latest release from X.org/freedesktop.org
There is a great, detailed history here. [linux-mag.com]