X Window System Turns 30 Years Old 204
An anonymous reader writes "One of the oldest pieces of the Linux desktop stack still widely in use today is the X Window System that today is commonly referred to as X11 or in recent years the X.Org Server. The X Window System predates the Linux kernel, the Free Software Foundation, GCC, and other key pieces of the Linux infrastructure — or most software widely-used in general. Today marks 30 years since the announcement of X at MIT when it was introduced to Project Athena." X wasn't new when I first saw it, on Sun workstations the summer before I started college. When did you first encounter it?
DECwindows ;) (Score:4, Interesting)
that's where I first saw X. at DEC we had DECwindows on ultrix (bsd like unix) and vax/vmx.
motif was the toolkit we developed guis in. and we used UIL to describe the UI, which was data that was read in and could change the look/feel of the widgets or their layout without rebuilding from source.
instead of node:1 for a display it was node::1 for the display (double colon meant decnet instead of that newfangled thing called IP)
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Likewise: VAX/VMS over DECnet. I still remember vividly the sudden paradigm shift I experienced at the time: one day I was used to "green screen" alphanumeric terminals, the next I suddenly understood the immense power and flexibility of a large bitmapped colour monitor. Previously I had thought that such workstations were only for graphic designers, people using CAD/CAM packages, or poncey pretentious managers who just wanted to have the latest hardware. After the first couple of hours on a training course
Re:DECwindows ;) (Score:5, Interesting)
We spent an inordinate amount of time and effort explaining (often to people with considerable software experience) why "client" and "server" were the wrong way round.
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I remember when Sun made the switch from SunTools to X-Windows. 1987'ish I thought they were nuts using a (slow) client-server architecture when we were fighting for graphics performance. As usual, it turned out to be another smart technical decision by Sun.
Re:DECwindows ;) (Score:5, Informative)
The best way to explain it, that I've found, is this:
A server lets clients access a shared resource. On a file server, it's storage. On a web server, it's documents. On a compute server, it's processing. On an X server, the shared resource is the display, and clients are given access to it.
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That is a good brief one liner to explain it. A single display (server) has multiple clients connecting to it using its display. That being said, the problem is that:
client = what human works on
server = what systems's team maintains
seems to be the more common definition. The objection is really about the definition of "server" as your definition makes clear.
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But those connections to the X Windows server may come from many different machines. At one job we had dedicated X terminals rather than local workstations, so every window was coming from a remote computer.
The client/server made much more sense in the past because not as many people had preconceived notions about client==desk and server==machineroom.
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It is very, very hard to find good information on the Internet because of the terminology used. Newbies and those that don't under
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There are projectors that support bluetooth connections and network connections. The current status quo need not be the status quo.
I also gave a presentation in a location that required using a proprietary (to that projector) usb dongle. That one was a bit scary.
Ultrix (was: Re:DECwindows ;) ) (Score:2)
Mine would be as a first-year EE student, NC State U. 1987. OSF wouldn't ship Motif for another year and half, so it was Athena Widgets and TWM all the way.
God, I miss the screaming. :-)
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Not sure when I first saw it. I had used Sun Windows before it converted to X. So the first time I saw it I wasn't so impressed because it was slower then Sun Windows had been.
One snag was that for the Suns we had without floating point hardware, any curve on a window such as the corners would take a long time to draw. It was quite noticeable and annoying until there was a new version/patch that fixed it. And X11 was much nicer overall when it came out.
Later Sun had their NeWS system which I thought was
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At NCSU, over the summer of 1989, the CSC department replaced a crapload of 68000-based four-terminal boxes running the UCSD p-system with DEC workstations running Ultrix and X11R4 with massive (for the time) 21 inch monochrome monitors and three button meeces. The basement of Leazar hall was filled with these things, and they showed up in other labs and other departments as well. Your home dir was NFS mounted so you could log in to anyone of them. There had previously been various other unix boxen for m
HP/UX (SGI?) for me (Score:2)
I still didnt have a graphical
Late 1989, on a VAXstation II/GPX (Score:2)
Late 1989, on a VAXstation II/GPX running VMS 5.0. Not exactly a desktop workstation, it was a desk-side box as big as a 2-drawer file cabinet. That newfangled DECWindows came out and killed off the old VMS GUI "VWS". Right about that same time the VAXstation 3100 came out, a true desktop VAX workstation...
The early versions ran a "desktop" called "XUI", which was replaced with Motif in 1991.
Another commenter wrote that the performance has not improved that much since the early 90s. My current desktop
On a bunch of UnixStations... (Score:2)
that's where I first saw X. at DEC we had DECwindows on ultrix (bsd like unix) and vax/vmx.
motif was the toolkit we developed guis in. and we used UIL to describe the UI, which was data that was read in and could change the look/feel of the widgets or their layout without rebuilding from source.
instead of node:1 for a display it was node::1 for the display (double colon meant decnet instead of that newfangled thing called IP)
In 1992, when I entered the University, I managed to see a variety of Unix workstations in different labs. Our Computer Science labs were exclusively Sun workstations - at the time, SunOS, not even Solaris. We had some DECstations (the ones based on MIPS 3k, not Alpha) in our VLSI lab, running DECwindows on Ultrix. In our Parallel Computing lab, we had some RS/6000 workstations running AIX and Motif (remember that?) There was one term when we had a Real Time computing class, which involved running HP/R
NeWS vs X (Score:2)
time to die... (Score:3, Funny)
time to die... (Score:5, Informative)
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... Wayland is in no way a 'replacement' for X any more than SDL is.
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Another "network transparency" myth supporter.... I'm 44 yo, and was also amazed by X11 and has been a good company all this years, but NEEDS TO BE REPLACED. All X11 devs say the same, and all of them hate the useless X11 heritage and cumberstone codebase. Not to talk about graphic driver makers.
No one is using the "network transparency" of X11 as it was intended to be used anymore, and has been like this for years. (Unless you use Motif, like 0.0000001% of the X11 apps). NO ONE USES SERVER-CLIENT PAINT PRI
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No one is using the "network transparency" of X11 as it was intended to be used anymore, and has been like this for years. (Unless you use Motif, like 0.0000001% of the X11 apps). NO ONE USES SERVER-CLIENT PAINT PRIMITIVES.
It's just image buffers sended over. Like VNC but without any optimization and using ugly paintig primitive trickeries.
So, then. Explain why scrolling in an X-forwarded text editor is pretty much instant, while I can watch the pixels redraw if I use the same application through VNC?
Ah, because this is just something you read on the Internet, and you don't use X-forwarding every day like I do?
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It is possible to have network transparency with Wayland.
The architecture resembles PulseAudio's concept of sinks/sources: in this case, applications and compositors.
Look it up!
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/04/03/1219239/remote-desktop-backend-merged-into-wayland
I realize it might not be as impressive as X's way of viewing it, but I'm sure you can do per-application and per-session forwarding with RDP (and if not, it should be possible to code an interface and allow people to choose their remote method)
Re:time to die... (Score:5, Informative)
OpenGL, in particular, wasn't really part of the plan. It's been hacking in (in a number of different ways); but it's still pretty easy to trip on a mine: If the program is running on the remote host; but using your GPU, GLX indirect rendering should work, as long as you don't hit any OpenGL extensions that expect direct hardware access; but if your application likes to throw big textures around as though it were developed for computers where the 3d card is separated from the CPU by 16 PCIe lanes, rather than a LAN(or, god help you, WAN), you'll notice.
If you want the server to do the work, so that you can use an actually-thin thin client, you end up with something like VirtualGL, which uses X11 on both ends; but actually handles slinging the image data with VNC...
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Here, here. In the late 90's, my employer heard a sales pitch from Citrix, who was doing remote desktop on Windows NT, and I was like "Oh yeah, we did stuff like this back in the day. Windows is just now catching up?"
Re:time to die... (Score:4, Informative)
The problem with network transparency in X11 is that it's done at completely the wrong place. With competing systems of the same era, such as NeWS, there was some code running in the display server for display updates. This meant that, for example, you could handle the visual feedback for a button press in the server, while transmitting the 'this button has been pressed' event to the client. In X11, you press the button but the server just sends a 'mouse clicked at x,y' message to the client, so you need a network round trip just to update the button. If you want to animate the button press, then you need to wait for network round trips to get the 'redraw finished' events. Wayland isn't a step backwards in this regard, but it's also not a step forwards.
In a modern X client, you don't really use much of the server's drawing functionality. You do store some images for compositing and will use XRender to composite them, but that's about it. The line drawing stuff can't handle antialiased lines, the text drawing stuff (aside from XRender) can't handle fonts provided by the client easily, so all you're really using the display server for is getting some texture memory and compositing it. With Wayland, you just get an OpenGL context and do the same thing. To be honest, if you're targeting X11 that's also what you should be doing for modern hardware: the rest of your drawing code most likely uses OpenGL (or something higher-level with an OpenGL back end), or just generates pixmaps, so doing the per-window compositing in OpenGL is a lot easier than doing it in a completely different API.
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Worse yet, all of those round trips are done synchronously. If the goal is network transparency, X is awful no matter how you slice it.
It is desirable to minimize the display to input path for interactive applications, and I'd love for the ability to use tablets as a custom interactive input panel for desktop applications. There will always be a delay in the event processing loop of an application, but I believe that this is the one which should be minimized, allowing truly interactive multitouch or pen b
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This is true. Everyone likes to criticize X, but X actually gives us something close enough for many purposes. The projects attempting to replace X have not aimed at creating this truly universal protocol, nor have they even aimed at the much more accessible goal of simply producing a protocol that is a bit closer to perfect than the one we have. No, they have avoided taking on this crucial task entirely.
I think that is more than eno
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No it isn't from network transparency. It is from networked applications. Network transparency is a specific mechanism for achieving application networking. Wayland has application networking it just uses a different mechanism.
Re:time to die... (Score:5, Informative)
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No. Remote display is used everyday. Network transparency is not. Funny enough remote display is a feature possible on Wayland too.
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I've used network-connected X-terms at home before, and with the advent of the connected house becoming possible I'm considering doing it on a larger scale. I can run lightweight boxes at each TV or workstation, and have them connect to a powerful box in another room. That powerful box can run multimedia applications like MythTV, and whoe
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I use it every day.
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Except Carousel is at 21 years of age :)
I know, you are referring to the film, though - they extended it to 30 so they could use "known" actors and actresses.
Re:time to die... (Score:4, Informative)
Ah, spoken in the true voice of slashdot ignorance.
The protocol is fine, the library isn't that horrible unless your a newbie to dev, nothing needs replaced and it was designed with extensibility to deal with modern problems in a sane way.
Just because you read some document written by someone who wants to replace it for selfish reasons like making their display system the standard doesn't mean its actually true.
Re:time to die... (Score:5, Interesting)
The protocol is fine,
Except for the fact that it has a limited set of extensions that can be supported and a load of command numbers are used for 'core protocol' stuff that no one has used for over a decade. It has no concept of security (you can easily steal input from another application, for example).
the library isn't that horrible unless your a newbie to dev
XCB is pretty nice, but xlib is a clusterfuck. It hides interfaces that need to be used asynchronously for good performance behind synchronous API calls. It's impossible to write an application that performs well over a network and does a nontrivial amount of drawing with xlib. It is with XCB, but it requires carefully designing your toolkit for asynchronous drawing, and all modern X toolkits have too much xlib heritage to easily adapt to using XCB as it's intended to be used, rather than as a lighter-weight xlib.
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ah, spoken with the voice of slashdotter pontificating out ass.
x11 is bloated with needless complexity, laggy because of map-expose-draw cycle, built in race conditions that can't be avoided, and has zero consideration for security
x11 is long overdue for the scrap heap
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nobody saw Logon's Run here? Am I that old...?
You might be. I certainly am. I fondly remember the movie but didn't think the spin-off TV series was all that good.
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nobody saw Logon's Run here? Am I that old...?
You might be. I certainly am. I fondly remember the movie but didn't think the spin-off TV series was all that good.
Ditto. Of course the TV series didn't have Jenny Agutter minus clothing, which made it instantly much more forgettable...
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Yes, I remember the movie. I even remember the TV spinoff. And yes, you are that old.
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I saw the film on TV first, but my memory of it was foggy until I saw it again on VHS many years later. They ran it as a precursor to the TV series [wikipedia.org] the first time I saw it, with the nudity edited out (which is quite significant for a PG movie). I was at an age where I had to beg my parents to let me see Star Wars because it was PG and had "Wars" in the name, so it was well before my tweens.
Too old. (Score:5, Funny)
30 is ancient in computer years, the X system is too old for the new generation of developers. I recommend we replace it with a far more superior one written in Javascript and Rails. With AGILE development methods we can have a better system up in a week.
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With AGILE development methods we can have something in a week. Whether it will be better or worse will depend on the features that could be developed within that sprint.
Anyway, I'd say 1 week is a very aggressive timeline, right? Do you work as a PM for Accenture?
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Your kid, but X apis are really dumb and obtuse. About the only thing you can say in its favor is that it makes a little more sense than the old MS windows message pump.
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Indeed, and mouse click events will be tweeted individually. The client can access them by "following" the relevant window!
Along the same line, framebuffers will be replaced with tumblr accounts.
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Those are pretty much pathologically inefficient framebuffers with a few convenience drawing primitives thrown in already, so just think of how accessible the venerable PC platform would become for today's web developers if all GPUs had JS interpreters and exposed a Canvas element for each monitor!
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No they didn't. Cloud applications run over high latency networks. X11 assumes low latency networks.
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With AGILE development methods you will wind up with a dirty snowball of a system that has zero ability to be extended without a complete rewrite.
1994-95 (Score:4, Interesting)
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Oh, the memories. 1994 in university, and they had a room of SGI Indy workstations, with Internet connection. Everything was utterly confusing with Unix, X11, ctwm and what not. Asking the wizards for help was pretty scary, as they would stare you down as if you were a waste of perfectly good carbon. Those were good times.
And then installing Slackware from floppy, onto a 486DX33 I think it was. Getting the X server up and running was pretty scary, which involved getting a supposedly supported graphics card,
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...we had NeXt workstations. I do not remember if they used X11
NeXT machines used Display Postscript not X.
Am I old?
Not at all, though there are some younger people around.
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NeXT machines used Display Postscript not X.
X11 was available, both commercial and free (e.g. CoXist), as an app that ran on NeXT's Display Postscript. I miss NeXT computers, looked good, performed well, easy to service, easy to program, good networking, good documentation, sported floppies that could write DOS disks which came in handy so many many times in those days before thumb drives. And I remember Display Postscript having some X-like network capability (but I didn't use it much). Besides, both the WWW and Doom, and who knows what else, start
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WABI (Score:4, Interesting)
First time I saw it was also on a Sun. Lowly kids like me (data entry clerk) had to use DOS on the job but the cool guys (engineers) had Sun workstations running WABI*. I was blown away by how much more advanced their stuff was than what we were stuck with. First time actually using it was when I finally managed to get Slackware installed along side Windows 95.
* Sun's Windows Application Binary Interface [wikipedia.org] which allowed a full blown Windows 3.1 installation to run on their "desktop".
Sun Lab in '87 (Score:5, Interesting)
It's funny, I'm working on a project for which a lot of the components were coded back in the mid '90s. The state of the art really hasn't advanced since then. The basic API (Xlib/Motif/Xcb) are nominally well documented -- you can find books and the library calls have man pages. Newer libraries and X extensions are a hodge-podge of largely-undocumented and generally incompatible API calls that take more work to integrate than they do to program in (Assuming you can find an example to work from.) The actual frameworks typically require you to drink all their kool-aid in order to use the framework. So I could go GTK+ or QT, learn their idioms and framework implementation details and that's great assuming I never want to change frameworks again and am willing to accept their quirks. And outside of QT, everyone (including motif/xlib) re-invent C++ badly with home-rolled type systems which often involve pushing strings around. Brilliant.
Somehow despite all this it still does what it does better than anything else I've seen. I'm not sure how this is possible, but there you go.
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The abomination that is the glib type system (used by GTK and others) is the perfect example of why reinventing the wheel is bad.
QT is a much nicer library to program for (and I say this as someone who has used both)
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And outside of QT, everyone (including motif/xlib) re-invent C++ badly with home-rolled type systems which often involve pushing strings around
Funny, I always felt that the signals and slots mechanism in Qt was reinventing Objective-C badly...
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Long-lived. (Score:2)
X11 is long-lived, not because it's the best, but because it's good enough and that there are a huge amount of applications depending on it. Changing to something else will just cause pain.
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Much like Windows XP. But try telling the geniuses around here who think it's just a matter of buying everyone a new PC.
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Much like Windows XP. But try telling the geniuses around here who think it's just a matter of buying everyone a new PC.
Nobody round here thinks that - here we all think it's just a matter on sticking [[insert flavour of the month Linux distro]] CD and clicking install. Because it really is that easy to rejuvenate your old XP machine, and all that software you had before has a new free replacement that you just need to learn. If there are any missing features or applications then you didn't really need them because if they were useful there would be a free software equivalent by now. Same for you old files if they won't c
Slackware 2.0.12 (Score:3)
Back when REAL Linux distros were named by the kernel version.
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You mean back before the 20-odd years of kernel 2.6?
Also, you gotta love the Slackware package management system: "Here's a tarball. Just untar it (as root) in the root directory and hope it doesn't clobber anything you care about."
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Slackware 2.0.12 (Score:3)
by Dishwasha (125561) Alter Relationship on 06-19-14 6:57 (#47271541)
Back when REAL Linux distros were named by the kernel version.
No, no they weren't. Because when I began using Slackware 2.0, the latest kernel that was provided for it was 1.1.47
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Obviously it wasn't a REAL Linux distro then.
Grad school. 1990. (Score:4, Interesting)
Employer morphed from being a Unix shop (1990-2000) to Microsoft + Mainwin (2000-2010) shop, then slowly coming back to display agnostic (2011 - till date) (but limited to X11+OpenGL or MSWin) shop.
X on HP-UX in 1988 (Score:2)
Worked OK then (more than a few memory leaks). Works much better now.
Kind of amusing the people who want to get rid of it just because it's old. Especially amusing are the people who seem to think they could re-write it in a week. Delusional but amusing.
Cheers,
Dave
Paul Asente's Stanford masters project (Score:4, Informative)
There was always the intent to make it objected-oriented, hence the tootlkit kludge called Motif. The early 80s was in flux over OO languages Xerox MESA, way-to-slow Smalltalk, ObjectPascal, etc. C++ and ObjectiveC wouldnt be around for a few more years.
Somewhere at MIT, maybe Media Lab (Score:3)
I was still working at Symbolics back then. We thought it a little silly that the input focus followed the mouse.
Now I sort of prefer it that way...
June, 1997 (Score:4, Interesting)
On a re-purposed Win NT 4.0 box running OpenCaldera 1.0. That was when I first dipped my toes into the Linux pool, and I've been swimming happily ever since.
Amiga - SIGGRAPH `89 (Score:2)
I was a senior in high school and wound up at SIGGRAPH in Boston in 1989. I was doing graphic design and programming for a small company that did medical imaging on the Amiga and we were in the Amiga pavilion. Nearby were some guys who had developed an X11 server and tools to build common X11 programs, with an optical three-button mouse. I think it was Dale Luck's company - I found a relevant announcement:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sys.amiga/ks3jiuCT5oQ
In 1992 I went to work for a company
'89 or '90 (Score:2)
My campus had some Sparc systems and more DEC systems, but it wasn't until '91 when my campus got a boatload of AIX systems that we really got into it and then shortly after that I got into Linux.
1994 (Score:2)
In college. I interned for a startup internet service provider in Niagara Falls called Macronet. It was located on my college. They had a BSD/OS server, on the console startx, into twm, using Mosaic. I still use TWM
1989 (freshman in college) (Score:2)
Undergrad CS lab had SGI and HP machines, and another lab had some Suns. Also 3 button mice and a scroll wheel that was a separate unit from the mouse.
The fun of making things pop-up on other people's screens on the lab. Nothing was locked down by default so unless you changed the permissions anyone could launch a process to display on your screen.
Neko was fun too.
1997 and badly disappointed (Score:2)
I heard so much about Linux, and how it blew Windows away, in terms of performance.
At the time, Windows 1995 ran acceptably well on a 386. Linux, with Gnome, was so slow, I could practically count the pixels as they appeared on my screen.
These days, I use Linux, nearly exclusively. On modern hardware, I think Linux does just fine. But on 1990s era hardware, not so much.
Network transparency of X has always impressed me (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been using Linux/UNIXes for 15yrs now. One of the beauties of X11 has been the fact that the application programmer typically does not even have to /plan/ for network transparency - it's built in right from the start (in the various graphics toolkits), no special APIs to .
This means that whenever the users have a need for displaying X11 apps remotely (e.g. needing to deploy new thin clients at short notice to accommodate new staff in a corporate environment - very quick setup time), you just simply set $DISPLAY and away you go. I've long come to count on this feature and I value having that option kept open all the time.
I believe in the future fibre optic LAN equipment will come down in price and will offer much lower-latency and higher-throughput than today's copper-wired Ethernet. It may even get to the point where transmit times of sending bitmapped real-time graphics over fibre may be as fast as a CPU writing to a reasonably modest PCI/AGP graphics card.
I think the Wayland project is making a SERIOUS mistake in treating network transparency as a second-class citizen, and will likely see the project relegated to a toy-like status (useful only for gaming and entertainment, or apps that need extremely low video latency like video editing suites) and shunned by the corporate world.
If the current X11 protocol makes it hard to do anti-aliased text, glossy/brushed GUIs, zooming fading menus, wobbly exploding windows and the like, then what we need is a new set of core drawing primitives, much like Apple's Display Quartz system (IIRC). Call it X12 if you will, but keep the network transparency in and that decision will pay off many times over.
I personally have no need for such resource-hogging eye-candy - I turn all of that off and prefer a minimalistic slick-but-functional snappy inteface. I am perfectly happy with X11, and all the current-version applications I use work well with it. It has its quirks and faults, but I believe they can be reasoned with and there is certainly room for improvement: http://www.x.org/wiki/Developm... [x.org]
I also think the Wayland proposals of polling (pixel-scraping) window buffers and sending them over rdesktop for remoting is only going to lead to massive CPU overhead on shared application servers, for one thing.
At the very least, I'd like to see the major graphics toolkit groups (Qt, GTK, WxWindows et. al.) collaborate on designing a standard remote drawing protocol that has similar transparency to X11 - then I might have more respect for Wayland attempting to replace X11.
(sorry for double post - accidentally selected wrong formatting mode. Mod my other post into oblivion if you wish).
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Great..it works for you and the type of applications you use. It absolutely does not and will not work for whats coming. Do you really want to try to move 4K bitmaps over the network? Some of the things that are "eye candy" for you are going to be needed for the applications and interfaces that are coming. X11 needs to be replaced and unfortunately Wayland is not going to cut it either.
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I dont want to touch a 4k bitmap in any way shape or form. Particularly not over the network.
"Some of the things that are "eye candy" for you are going to be needed for the applications and interfaces that are coming"
You have to be more specific. Something is 'coming.' Lovely. Is it something I might actually want on my computer for some reason, or is it more flashy marketing and idiotic overblown effects that I will just be looking for a way t
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Here is an example. An aerospace customer of mine wants to use their CAD and engineering apps from terminals on the shop floor. They do not want to put a high dollar workstation in that environment but they do want the full graphics. The current methods for doing this don't really work acceptably with todays video resolutions, much less with retina/4K resolutions.
How about remote access for contract developers over VDI? IDEs work better with more screen real estate today. How do you think they are going to
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CAD is one of those applications I mentioned where you actually need the video bandwidth. Trying to do CAD on a dumb terminal with a remote clie
1986 (Score:2)
I first saw X on Apollo workstations in 1986. At that date all the Sun workstations in the lab still ran a windowing system called 'News', if I remember correctly. I saw X on both Suns and Silicon Graphics workstations before 1988, and on DEC Station and RS/6000 machines shortly thereafter. We also had PERQ machines in the lab but I don't believe they ever ran X. In those days I used Xerox 1108 and 1186 machines, which didn't run X.
The first machine I personally owned which ran X was an Acorn R260 running R
When did I first see X? (Score:2, Funny)
I first remember seeing X11 on a family vacation. We visited my uncle on his remote tropical island on which he was building a theme-park. My sister actually introduced me to it, because she knew it.
Migration from VT220 (Score:2)
May of 2002, I must be new here. (Score:2)
Since, I'm not a programmer, or wasn't at a University in the late 80's, my first exposure to X was in 2002 on a wacky Red Hat 6 variant on a wacky MIPS variant. In fact it was Slashdot where I first heard about Linux, so I'm a johnny-come-lately.
Since the machine ran RH6, it was a fairly standard distro of that time period, Windowmaker was the default window manager, though others were installed, KDE1, Gnome 1 something or other, FVWM. Default desktop looked something like this:
http://ps2linux.no-ip.info [no-ip.info]
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That being said, i'd still not use it because a nice GUI is useless when the rest is crap.
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But Windows 8? Renders your judgement out of date I think.
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Back in the day the repaint strategy of XFree86 was terrible and windows flickered a lot when their contents were updated. Windows did not have this problem. X got rid of the flicker it when we moved
You are confusing an implementation XFree86 with the general case (X). As it happens, X supported BackingStore on windows for a long time, which meant flicker-free updates in the 90s. I think XSGI had that on by default and it looked amazing.
Whichm, on-topic is how I first encountered it. Something on an Apollo
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Macs don’t ship Xquartz by default anymore (since 10.5 if memory serves right)
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He didn't say ship, he said runs on.
Of course, it also runs on Windows and pretty much every other OS of any size as well.
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GP is right, it did ship with the OS. It was on the DVDs in the extras folders.
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One of the beauties of X11 has been the fact that the application programmer typically does not even have to /plan/ for network transparency
That's simply not true. It's very easy to write an application using X11 that works reasonably well with a local view but performs *terribly* when running remotely. You definitely need to take these cases into consideration when developing your application.
Sure - you don't need to make special calls in order to get network transparency - but these days nobody does. RDP and other OS-level remote desktoping things will do that for any application - and often better.
I remember the glory days of X and showin
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However much the technology improves WANs won't go faster than the speed of light. A perfect network and you are still talking around 17ms to get across the USA. Make lots of round trips and application performance sucks. Use touch interfaces and humans start noticing around 1ms of latency and don't like latency over 10ms. You can't fix the problem with X11.
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Ditto, can place it to summer 1988. The VAXStations (must have been a 2000 based on the date) were very impressive (when you were used to washing-machine sized VAXen). Wasn't allowed to play with it much (at all) though.
Then it was another year of green-screens (terminals + mainframe) at college before they threw out the old mainframe and replaced with HP-UX boxes. As someone else said - Athena Widgets and TWM (in our case apparently motif was too expensive).
Installing SLS (and later Slackware) from flop
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No, X was the follow on to W from Stanford. I doubt you ran X on a BLIT, but on a 630MTG, aka Son of a BLIT. I was one of the engineers that ported X to the 630. That was an awesome project, and we had an incredible team to do it. Our server out performed the USL X server, and all we had was a 10MHz 68000, while they had a 25MHz 386 with a 387.