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Xig Ad Campaign Slamming Xfree? 423

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-read dept.
San Mehat wrote in to point us to a full-paged Accelerated-X ad that has taken to some old fashioned mudslinging. The most incriminating quotes are "Buckle Up. If you're still using that free X server that came with your linux distribution, well hazardous conditions lie ahead" and "When the X server 'falls over'--crashes--the entire operating system goes down and usually the user unfairly blames Linux itself'. What do you think?
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Xig Ad Campaign Slamming Xfree? More

Xig Ad Campaign Slamming Xfree?

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  • i have never had xfree bring down my whole system and the only time when x has ever crashed at all is when i have been messing around trying to make quake3/kingpin/half-life/quake or any sort of 3d games work.
  • I suspect the problem is that emacs uses its own system for cut and paste that was basically grafted on to the original emacs keyboard commands. That probably doesn't play nice with whatever was built into X.

    Someone emailed me suggesting xemacs, which I do in fact use on my SGI workstation in the office, where it works great. But for some reason under Linux it comes up with this totally bizarre and unreadable colour combination (something like black on a dark blue or purple background). Even using xemacs' built-in colour change commands doesn't switch it - I think it might be some kind of X colour thing, but I'll be darned if I know what to do about it. I'm using KDE with SuSE Linux, I think version 6.1.

    D

    ----
  • I used Accel-X some two years ago. I remember having quite a few problems with it, due to some shared libraries it installed over existing ones.

    On the other hand I've never had a problem with Xfree. Never crashed on my setup.

  • Please people, it's just an ad! (Score:3)

    by marvinx ( 9011 ) on Thursday October 14, 1999 @10:39AM (#1612841) Homepage
    OK, I think we all have better things to do than complain about a lame ad. This post should really have been "What's better? Commercial X servers or XFree?" Let's just take a deep breath and realize that what the post is about is just tride and true commercial marketing. I think we're all smart enough to see through this fluff.

  • "It's a total bitch to configure, but aside from that...."



    Try /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XF86Setup, it's so easy, it's scary.
  • I'm with you. They could at least charge a reasonable price for it.
  • That may be true of the older versions of Netscape, but I've found that 4.7 glibc is pretty stable. (Read: I haven't had many problems with it)
  • ...makes will make people who never heard of it check it out

    This is just silly... Every Linux distribution already comes with XF86 pre-installed, so there is no need for people to "check it out".

  • This summer I got a new laptop, which neither XFree nor AcceleratedX managed to get X working on properly (despite using the correct settings and the card was said to be supported, a Trident Cygber 9388 I belive). I mailed the AcceleratedX people about it, and they said if I would loan them my laptop for a short while (they pay shipping both ways plus you get to keep some mega protective case) that they would both write the driver and give me a free copy of AcceleratedX. Their responce time was within minutes of me mailing it and they were very kind and informative. I do agree that in most cases you're better off with XFree (especially 4.0 that will have dedicated DGA mode or something similar!) or maybe good old console, but don't give them a bad rep for their customer service. Also, I might add, AcceleratedX has a MUCH MUCH better configuration interface than XFree; I constantly fuck up xf86config and find myself having to run it maybe 4 or 5 times until I have a configuration that is mistake free. I'd also like to point out on the stability issue, XFree crashes on me maybe twice a day; usually I just get so frustrated from near every app crashing nonstop I'll just stick to being a console jockey.
  • Umm, what about CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE?

    What indeed? My X server crashes occasionally on my laptop (S3 Virge/MX chip), and locks up so tight I can't Ctrl-Alt-ANYTHING -- no killing the server, no switching to a text console, not even ctrl-alt-del to do a controlled shutdown. The only thing I can do is a 0V-suspend, which is useless because when I power it up again X is still locked. I assume the OS is still running, but without a network connection or an external terminal (which are rarely available on planes and trains), what good does that do me?

    My only choice is to power it down cold, and wait for fsck to clean up the mess on reboot. So it's functionally equivalent to an OS crash, and that sucks.

    Does anyone know a way to kill X when it has seized the keyboard?

  • I thinnk you misspelled "CD-ROM tray" as "cupholder". :-)
  • What actually happened that time is that X seemingly froze in the process of switching from a console back into X. Whenever I hit ALT-F7, I would get a blank screen, but the process list said that X was still running. CTRL-ALT-BKSP wouldn't do anything at the blank screen, so all I could really think of to do was kill the processes from a console and restart X; I didn't have to reboot the system entirely.

  • Great! But where's the source?? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    To really compete in Linux, they must make their source code available. I'm not even saying make it "RMS" free.

    With the source(with whatever license), I can:
    Quickly fix bugs if I want.
    Recompile on whatever OS I have or upgrade to.
    Maintain the software if the owning company
    goes under.

    Without source code, This is very close to Software Renting. Your lease expires whenever you upgrade your OS, or switch hardwarde...

    So I'd rather send a check to XFree, than rent software.
  • You havn't used windows NT on many different systems, have you?
    I deal with windows NT every day. Bad video drivers exist there just as often as on linux, if not MORE often.
    At least with linux you have a hope of recovery if the video fails tho :).
    Yes, there are points where NT has advantages. THis is not one of them.
  • ... X has never crashed Linux on my computer before. I think it may have froze the display once or twice, but it was always accessible via network.
  • I'm not sure whether you'll follow yours own thread but I'll reply anyway :). I had some similar experience but I would blame that on my hardware. I got some 64M of crappy RAM - stupid me. On another machine, the system behaves much, much better. But as the others have said, try ctrl-alt-backspace, ctrl-alt-del or telnet onto your machine from another computer and kill X.
  • i've also experienced this problem. netscape will lock uness i use the edit/paste command. if i say highlight text on a webpage and then try and paste it to an email (using netscape mail) using the middle mouse button, netscape will often choke.

    i think this is problem with netscape however as i have experienced the problem on several different unices and several different X servers.
  • XFree doesn't support session control in the same way that the new HotDesk does (I think); you can't just "suspend" the X as you can do with screen(1), and then move to another terminal and reattach the suspended X session there.

    Have you looked at VNC (Virtual Network Computing, http://www.orl.co.uk/vnc [orl.co.uk] if I recall correctly)? It's GPL'd software, and lets you do what you are looking for - and with many different operating systems, both as servers and as clients.
  • Just gives me an html error when I try to view it.
  • But what if your xserver locks up your keyboard (had this once or twice) the mouse worked and furtunately I could select system->reboot but what if you disabled this ???
    offcourse you could allways use a serial terminal, but if you don't have one, you're screwed!

    ---
  • Actually, the ATI drivers work excellently on my 4MB Rage IIc PCI card. XFree has only crashed once on me, and that seemed to be Netscape's fault. @$#%# Motif!
  • I dont know that Accelerated X is any better in terms of overall design. I imagine that they are still running as root and directly talking to the hardware. The only way to get a really stable server in my opinion would be to have the kernel in charge of the video system, just like any other resource. The folks over at GGI are doing this and have an X server that runs on thier video drivers.
  • That ad is really ugly. It reminds me of a political campaign ad. Even if it were true it would still be inexcusable. I bought a copy of Accel X about a year ago when I bought my laptop. I got a Digital HiNote 2000. It had a chipset that was only experimentally supported by Xfree (C&T 65554). Accel X was easy to install compared to XFree. However, it had a couple of problems. The worst was several fuzzy vertical lines each about ten pixels wide. It was pretty annoying, but The HiNote was not offically supported by Accel X anyway. So, just for the hell of it I tried the XFree server. Guess what. It worked perfectly. I did have to copy the timings out of the Accel X configuration files though. So basically I paid $100 (I think) for timings for my display. Here it is a year later and XFree configuation utilities have far surpassed anything that was available for anything a year ago. Larry
  • I've been using it since 2.1 and haven't had a problem with any version.

    Of course I buy my hardware with XFree86 in mind.
    I've use S3 86c801 and S3 Virge cards in the past.

    I only use Matrox cards these days (8mb Millennium 2s are cheap and the best 2D cards around!)

    I'm running the 3.9.16 "beta" these days.
  • I think I had X crash once on me and I know it was something I messed up in the process..


  • Xig is not as good as they think. Accelerated X did *not* work correctly on my laptop -- I got only 15 bit color! -- XFree do a pretty good job, I have never had problems with them.


    Back of with that commercial FUD crap!

  • Re:wow... (Score:3)

    by Surak ( 18578 ) <.surak. .at. .mailblocks.com.> on Thursday October 14, 1999 @02:58PM (#1612880) Homepage Journal
    So after all those posts saying that how Linux is so much more stable then NT, it is now that we can surmise that well, yeah, the box is more stable, but only if you have a second console to be able to telnet into with in the case that X locks up the display...

    You can also change to a virtual terminal to kill the X server, provided your keyboard isn't locked out, even if Ctrl-Alt-Backspace doesn't seem to work.

    Let's not forget that LOTS of people have networks at home now. Telnetting in isn't impossible...you don't even need a second Linux box. Although, you are correct in stating that if X crashes AND locks out your keyboard AND you can't telnet in, you're pretty well hosed.

    However, on my box, which is AMD K62 450 with a Riva 128 board, X quite rarely crashes. I had a few problems in the beginning when I didn't make a big enough swap partition, but after that, its smooth sailing. The only applications that can totally hose X on my system are Netscape and StarOffice, and in that case, I tend to place the blame on those applications, which are severely bloated and buggy.

    X doesn't use all the available memory on some video cards

    Well, in the case of XFree86, this is mostly due to the fact that good specs aren't available to the writers of the drivers, which often have to reverse engineer things to get a driver, or if there is no specific driver, the user is forced to use the SVGA server, which is pretty generic.

    However, to play devil's advocate here, I'll make the case that you should really pick hardware that works well with your chosen platform, not the other way around. Since software is the reason you're using the computer in the first place, the software must dictate what hardware you will run, and not the other way around. Macintosh fans can scream 'til their blue in the face that their hardware platform is somehow "superior" to my generic Intel-based box, but since the software I need doesn't run on Macintoshes, they'll never persuade me to change my hardware.

    The same holds true for peripherals. If you're using Linux, you're obviously not going to buy a winmodem. You can't fault Linux for not having winmodem support, you have to say well, since Linux doesn't support winmodems, I simply will choose not to buy one. If you follow the logic, then you'll have to say the same thing about video cards: if Linux (or in this case XFree86 in particular) doesn't support a given video card fully then it becomes obvious that you shouldn't buy that card until such support becomes available.

    X is a lot more pickey about what monitor it runs on.

    Not at all. If you're monitor isn't directly supported in the config files or by your favorite X configuration utility, you can always program the refresh rates yourself. X will work with ANY monitor your video card supports.

    X crashes leave Linux in an unuseable state

    Not always. Most of the time, if X crashes, I'm able to fix it.

    Kernel prevents X from accessing memory it needs in order to run..

    Well, if thats true, then that statement would apply to any X server, not just XFree86. However, a blanket statement such as this one is most certainly false. While I could forsee that in some instances, the kernel might not allow X to allocate memory, if this happened all the time X would be unusable. The fact that the majority of Linux users have no problem using X on standard configurations would seem to point to the contrary.





  • Around May 1998 I saw an advertisment for Accelerated-X in LJ, with the same " ... that free X-server that came with your Linux distribution ... " - it waxed lyrical about Accelerated-X providing support for laptop hardware that XFree86 didn't. The whole theme of this one and the one before makes me think of marketing paradigms and mission statements and many companies whose names begin with M.
  • Hmm. It's not forbidden to mention other companies when mentioning factual data - say, price comparisons. I haven't seen the ad in question, but that's my guess at it. The law applies (I think) to making comments which are defamatory without basis. It would be fine to say that "AOL are cheaper than Compuserve" but not that "Compuserve are a ripoff". Both say the same thing, of course.

    Blah, whatever.

    --Remove SPAM from my address to mail me
  • In the ideal world, you'd contribute effort to the open source component,

    In the real world, not everybody on the planet who might use an X server is an X server wizard in a position to "contribute effort to the open source component".

  • I'm not even attempting to imply anything about NT, just that it takes an article like this for Linux users to admit that, yes, there are some things that need to be worked on...

    I always read rambles about how Linux is uncrashable compared to NT, etc..., but then reading this one and seeing everyone voice up and say "Well, MY system doesn't work that way" or "When X crashes I'm completely frozen from my system, except i can still telnet into it"

    I think a system is only as capable as the person whose responsible to run it... Too often, that tidbit is left out of discussions around here.
  • Ok, first, I would like to say that I am a really experienced user/admin, and I admit Linux isn't perfect (my system is the most stable, but that is because I have a screwy CD-ROM drive), but in my humble experience, Linux handles all adverse situations better than NT. Period.

    First, X hasn't crashed on my computer once.

    Second, I have never seen X be picky about monitors (I've set it up on plenty of equipment). All you have to do is tweek the resolution, vert refresh and horizontal sync. The color depth is more or less up to your video card's capabilities. I've seen some rather impressive tools for dealing with the even more advanced settings in X (the SuSE tool, SaX, is incredibly good for doing all this tweeking).

    Now, that does sound a bit complex, but when I set up X, I was a relative newbie to the world of refresh rates and screen resolutions. I got X running with the desired settings within minutes of setting out to get it running. That was over a year ago. I'm very sure that SaX has been improved greatly in that year.

    Jeff

  • Ok, my IMPS/2 will jump around on my screen when I switch VT's from console to X, and I get huge numbers of gpm: Error in protocol in my /var/log/messages. What am I doing wrong?
  • Other than the one crash where I had to manually kill the X processes, X usually doesn't freeze for me. The most common crash I get (which is, at times, more common for me than Win98 + netscape crashes on the same system) has to do with my mouse, so I'm guessing it's probably either a quirk with my laptop (Dell Inspiron 3200, with a built-in touchpad) or, as someone suggested to me, possibly GPM. Basically, when I try to switch from a console to X, I seem to have a one-in-ten or so chance of getting something like 'cannot open mouse: device busy' (can't remember the exact error), and then X exits with 'explicit kill or server shutdown', and I have to restart X, although the system itself is fine.
  • Metrolink is a much better company. They were one of the first commercial companies releasing Linux software (such as Motif ports), and they regularly contribute to XFree86 and other free software causes. Plus they don't charge astronomical prices for their X server.

  • This is nothing new (Score:4)

    by frohike ( 32045 ) <bard.allusion@net> on Thursday October 14, 1999 @10:49AM (#1612894) Homepage
    I've been on the XFree86 developer's list for quite some time, and apparently this is nothing new.

    Basically what's been said on the issue (since it's been brought up several times) is that the guy who started Xig (Thomas Roell I think it was?) is the one who wrote X386, which is the basis for XFree86 today. Apparently he is a bit miffed at the success of the project, and the apparent lack of success in getting ahead of it in his own project.

    This generally tends to inflame people who are working on free software that is generally of higher quality than the corresponding commercial software, but they are bashed for their free work. XFree86 4.0 will be worlds above Accel-X in performance, modularity, and features. The thing is, XFree knows this, and so does Xig. The XFree policy is not to sling mud back, and not to post any kind of benchmarks (which often don't make sense anyway), but to simply let the consumer decide what they want to use. We're writing XFree86 for ourselves, and if other people get a good bit of use out of it, then we've more than served our purpose.

    The main thing that companies like Xig and Metro-X have above XFree is that they can write proprietary drivers for cards where the manufacturers are too stingy with their specs to let the open source/free software people at it. At least Metro-X knows this, and they contribute code back and forth freely with XFree (including the new module loading system in XFree 4.0, which is pretty awesome).

    Don't get all hyped up about this. It's nothing new. It's sad that it's happening in the way it's happening, but just wait for XFree86 4.0 to come out, and there won't be much mud left to sling except that tired old FUD that most people try to use in commercial vs free software. As Linus Torvalds said, "talk is cheap".
  • You know this wasn't too bright for the folks over at Xi. Let's look at who would buy this stuff. Anyone dealing with X servers HAS to know quite a bit by the nature of X windows; that has always been the case and from what I've seen in Xfree 4 will continue to remain the case. So let's establish one thing, that anyone who deals with 30 workstations all running X knows their stuff. It's something no amateur could do, period.

    Now that we've established that the people setting up UNIX (Or Linux in this case) workstations have to be knowledgable, most of these people will have worked with the various servers that come with Xfree 3.3 or whatever version is public and stable right now. From what I've seen throwing X at numerous S3, Trident, and Cirrus Logic chipsets the SVGA server has performed _flawlessly_, its only flaw being that on the older 2.0.x series it was none too speedy. On 2.2 the speed difference was dramatic enough to make this a non issue; I never got Xfree to crash regardless of the 3 video card manufactures above with 3 or 4 different chipsets from each. So now we've established that yes, Xfree, even if it is fairly large, is fairly stable as well and for standard apps its speed is fine. (My tests were on Pentium/200s, K5/133s, K6/200s, and PII/400s with the above video cards.)

    Now where does it leave this ad? You have a company proclaiming that free X servers suck to a bunch of people who know X fairly well and have probably been using free X servers for quite awhile. So where does that leave this ad? I believe it gets demoted to FUD, and we all know what we think of that...
  • it might get somewhere.

    My school put UltraPenguin on all its Javastations. Now you usually have to log in twice from the Javastations because the first time you log in, X goes down and restarts.

    Its incredibly annoying, so unless I want to use the school's paper, I usually log in from my Solaris box, do my work, then FTP all the files I want to print back to my system.

    P.S. While we're talking about crashing X servers, on x86, XSun (aka OpenWindows) crashes every time if you try to use Window Maker with a background image, if it's not been configured with --disable-shm. There is a patch for Solaris 2.6 that fixes the problem, but none for Solaris 7...
  • was that the retractable cup holder that sez compact disc on the front ?
  • I've been using Linux for about 4 years now...

    I've used XFree86 for 98% of that time...

    Let's count the ways it's crashed, shall we?

    Number 5 BadBlocks on harddrive.. (Ok.. so this froze Linux completely.. so it doesn't really count)

    Number 4 CHEAP S3 variant cards... (no big surprise there)

    Number 3 Alpha software (yeah.. ok.. sometimes I just can't wait)

    Number 2 User stupidity :> hehehe... (my personal Favorite)

    And the number 1 source of the greatest number of crashes of XFree86??

    Gnome/Enlightenment

    I've had more crashes in the last 6 months than I've
    had in the previous 3 years... 4 of those required
    a hard reboot. All the ohters I fixed from telnet.

    OTOH... I have an ATI Xpert@Work and tried AX5.x
    and had nothing but problems... *shrug*
    Maybe it's not supported all that great (RH 6.0)
    but it wasn't worth the hassle. Just too wierd.
    It hung and crashed quite a bit.

    I like Xfree and I'll stick with it... XF86Setup is
    killer as well... (I've been using it for what? 4 years now? hehehe)
  • Why didn't you (or did you?) try the tricks on the Linux Laptop pages? There's a solution for the Inspiron 7000 on the LT chip. Of course.. I've got the new media-P (I think they ran out of stock, so mine was a roll over). I still need to play more with xfree to get the tricks listed to work... its not fun getting Caldera at Linux World and than seeing the nice, pretty KDE desktop mangled and unusable.

    I've been tempted a few times to go download a demo of AccelX just because I followed the thread on the Inspiron / media-P off their site...
  • This is a big problem that needs more clarification. I've heard so many people say "X Crashed my system!" that it almost makes me sick. I would wager (IANAXP...err I am not an X programmer) that 90% or more of the problems people experience are really just the fault of some buggy program. FUD like this only makes it even harder for people to draw the line between XF86 as the problem causer and something else like the crap I wrote last week that always locks X when I start it. :)

  • I'm keeping my hopes high. I had the opportunity to take in Dirk Hohndel's presentation on XFree86 4.0, and I've since played with the current XFree86 4.0pre source release. It's coming along quite well - I had some minor things to deal with with the tdfx driver, but it's FAST. Fastfastfast. And this isn't a fully accelerated driver yet, either. (The final release will, from my understanding, have ALL drivers that can using the XAA interfaces.) There's no automated config-generation tool yet, but that will (of course) be remedied before the final release as well. And with multihead and GL/DRI support... these are features that XiG charges big bucks for.

    Get ready XiG. Your market may begin evaporating sooner than you'd like to believe.
  • Xconfigurator with redhat is even easier and has autodetect.
  • Actually, there is one difference between laptops and desktops. The laptop has an LCD, while the desktop uses a CRT. (I know, this is changing, but it is close to a rule right now). CRT's are driven from a card via a DAC (Digitial to Analog Converter). This is told a small number of things - number of lines, number of Pixels per line, refresh rate, H-Blank, V-Blank interval timings and the mode is set.

    On LCDs there is only one mode and all the others have to be emulated in a way that doesn't look TOO ugly. No a priori reason why this should be more difficult than programming a DAC, but in practice it seems to be. This may justify a premium, but not 3x.
  • Yeah, it sucks. And in my humble opinion, they are full of shit. I don't think my X server at home has ever managed to bring down my entire box (and in the very rare cases where I put X on a server, it's never actually configured to display anything locally). But the truth of it is, that's the nature of competition. Let the bastards sling mud all they want, it's not like they're the first to do so. I just hope they don't expect any sympathy when they lose any support from the open source community that they may have had.
  • ...would as many people have been so
    likely to start using Linux on a regular basis if the only X server available was
    commercial and cost at least $100? I know I wouldn't have.



    Well I would. In fact I ran Coherent until I heard about Linux. Even then I never really ran X on a regular basis until KDE appeared.

    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction

  • My crash story (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yeah, I had X crash on me once. I was running about 5 or 6 screensavers on the root window. They were running fine. However, a comrade of mine, in the lab, decided he'd open an xeyes on my display at a resolution of 20,000 x 20,000. I saw a 21" pupil, and it wasn't following my mouse. Sure, we tried accessing it remotely, it was SLOW at first, but before we could shut it down, we got tired of waiting (1/2 hour) and just hit the reset switch.

    that's my story
    BTW, last post (for now). (I promise, i'll never do it again)

  • Re:wow... (Score:3)

    by alhaz ( 11039 ) on Thursday October 14, 1999 @03:51PM (#1612912) Homepage
    Maybe what he's refering to there is that stock Linux kernels aren't capable of allocating large (like, 4-16 megs) contiguous physical chunks of memory.

    X doesn't need this, the gui doesn't need it generally speaking.

    It is however pretty helpful for some sorts of video streaming setups.

    Currently there's a BigPhysArea patch that allows you to remove a large physical area from the pool that the kernel draws from, which you can then use in a userland driver.

    It's certianly possible to advance the kernel to make this sort of thing possible, Linux isn't heavily video-oriented at the moment, But if you want bragging rights, compare X to the windowing system used in BeOS.

    The only reason NT's gui gets everything it wants is because it's inserted into the kernel. That's a gargantuan trade-off in terms of robustness, and certianly nothing to brag about.




  • I can only recall 1 time in recent years that an X server has crashed on me. I was running MATLAB with an early KDE, and a certain action in MATLAB would take X down. This was very repeatable. (I wish I could say the same thing everytime NT has crashed on me -- the NT crashes can never be repeated and take NT down for the count.) In this case it would not crash Linux, just throw you out of X. Anyway, after upgrading to the latest rev of KDE at the time, it was fixed, and has never happened again.

    I have had great success and stability with the various XFree servers I have used (S3V, SVGA, and Mach64). And if I did have problems, I would expect them to be resolved in short order).

    Now keeping Netscape from crashing, that is another story. Of course, it has never brought down X on me.



  • I've had X crash on me more times than I care to think about; it doesn't seem to like my laptop's mouse.

    This may be a stretch, but are you running gpm? If so, kill it and see if that helps take care of the crashes.

    -Brent
    --
  • Microsoft did that for a reason. They figured, and quite rightly so, that one of the best way for a novice to feel safe using a computer is to make the mouse as responsive as possible. I often laugh when Windows crashes and I get a blank screen with the mouse cursor. I would say to my friends, "Windows has just crashed... but at least the mouse works."

    Compared to Windows, XFree's mouse cursor is unresponsive. You can just feel the difference when you use each for a period of time.

    --

  • I can consistently crash my Linux box by running Netscape and checking my IMAP mailbox. I can't Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, Alt-Fx or even telnet in from another machine on the subnet. Nothing but the Microsoft shuffle (pressing Reset) can bring it back. I don't blame XFree86 or Linux, this is definitely a Netscape problem.
  • AFAIK, that's the sort of thing the GGI folks are aiming for: an API which you can build anything graphical on - even other graphics libraries! - that talks to some kernal stuff and some non-kernel stuff.

    The goal is to have the kernel protect the display resources the same way it protects the disk, yet allow display drivers to work "under" than in user-space.

    Wade.

  • You have to remember how many things can go wrong that people can blame on the X server...
    gpm may not give up the mouse in switching from console to X, window manager may crash and you lose pager functionality, etc...
    I've never has an X crash, but I have had window manager crashes...
  • If you had bought a B&W G3, your cup holder would have come with a ingenious blue brace, of course the cup holder itself is a little high for my liking and I'm not sure why they changed manufacturers, the cup holder itself isn't much different than the one made by CD, although my friend told me that DVD is the wave of the future so they must be doing something right.
    --

  • wow... (Score:3)

    by um... Lucas ( 13147 ) on Thursday October 14, 1999 @11:04AM (#1612950) Journal
    So after all those posts saying that how Linux is so much more stable then NT, it is now that we can surmise that well, yeah, the box is more stable, but only if you have a second console to be able to telnet into with in the case that X locks up the display...

    Really! Just a little while ago (in the Gartner thread) there were all these posts saying things like: "Linux kicks NT's as in terms of stability", "Linux can dominate the desktop"... Face it, if X crashes, the system may as well be crashed if you're an end user.

    Lets' just continue the list a little more, shall we?

    X doesn't use all the available memory on some video cards.

    X is a lot more pickey about what monitor it runs on.

    X crashes leave Linux in an unuseable state

    Kernel prevents X from accessing memory it needs in order to run...

    And you wonder why Gartner says that Linux isn't ready for the desktop? Joe user (and me) doesn't want to worry about a kernel not wanting to give my video card the memory it needs to run. I just want to plug it in, maybe load some drivers and have it work...

    -----------------

    Go ahead, moderate me down... I've got karma to burn!
  • > But what if your xserver locks up your keyboard?

    Different solutions are available. First, you can log from another system/machine/terminal and reboot it. But with the 2.2 kernels you can also use the Magic SysRq keys; Go to Raw mode, flush the buffers, remount the partitions read-only, and reboot. All of those operations are available even if X crashed and took the keyboard away from the apps. For more informations, read /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sysrq.txt.

    seb.
    --
  • You are completely missing the point. Of course when your graphics subsystem crashes it might leave the keyboard locked up. This holds true whether you're on Linux or NT.

    The difference is that in Linux, when the graphics subsystem crashes, you at least have the option of killing the X server over the network. With NT, if the graphics subsystem crashes (and don't tell me it never crashes), you're looking at a blue screen.

    The ability to recover via network when the graphics subsystem crashes is a feature that is useful and absent in Windows NT. It's ironic that you slam X crashes as leaving a Linux system unusable, when in reality the situation is exactly opposite of what you describe. Between Linux and Windows, the only OS that is left unusable by a graphics system crash is Windows, not Linux.

  • We've seen that one over here, without help fo the government :)

    Every couple of years, usually in California, someone opens a topless donut store. Not the customers, but topless waitresses. Yes, it's a dumb idea, and not viable. Left to themselves, they'd be gone within a month.

    But what happens, which they *count on* before opening, is that NOW will come picket, and local news will cover the pickets. They sell a lot of donuts (probably very bad donuts :) for a couple of months, and then go away--having made a killing, thanks to the notoriety.
  • Well, I'd love to say that I've never seen X crash, but the unforutnate truth is that it crashed on me a couple of times (actually, it was an old version of KWM that crashed - and it was reproducable... but it only ever happened with an old S3 video card.) And yes, it was a complete lock-up.. no network or anything else.

    Also, my computer has crashed a few times in Linux; always with NFS (if I don't use NFS, it works 100%)

    Netscape (under Linux) has crashed a total of 4 times (I think - might be only 3..) in 18 months.

    Other than that, I've never experienced a single crash, or lockup, or failure (and this is on 18 boxes.)

    I'd say that's pretty damn stable.
  • When was the last time your XFree86 crashed? When was the last time your computer crashed, and you blamed it on Linux?

    I've had Gnome and Enlightenment crash on me plenty of times (hmm... beta software and beta software, what a great choice for the default setup on RedHat), so I switched to wmx and now the only thing that crashes is Netscape (and my own stuff while under development).

    Yeah, you need a commercial quality X server about as much as you need a commercial quality OS.
  • It drives me nuts that I can't cut and paste from emacs to Netscape. If Accelerated X would fix that, it might be worth the money.

    The Accelerated-X server's involvement in cut-and-paste is that it accepts requests from X clients to set and get various properties on windows, and the like; the problem you're having is probably a problem with what either Emacs or Netscape is doing, not with what the X server is doing.

    Maybe those applications are dynamically-linked with toolkit libraries that are doing the X requests to do the cut-and-paste operations, and maybe, if you also use XiG's versions of the client libraries, it'll work better (or if you relink a statically-linked Emacs with those libraries), but I wouldn't count on it.

    I just tried it with GNU Emacs 19.34.3 and Netscape Communicator 4.02 on Solaris 2.5.1 (displaying on Exceed on an NT box); paste-current-selection (i.e., select something in the GNU Emacs window, and hit the middle mouse button in the Netscape window) worked, but true copy-and-paste (select something in the GNU Emacs window, use the "Edit/Copy" menu item in Emacs, go to the Netscape window, select the "Location" box, and try to use "Edit/Paste") didn't - the "Edit" menu had "Paste" grayed out. (I did copy-and-paste rather than cut-and-paste because I ran Emacs on a file to which I didn't have write access; both of them should use the CLIPBOARD X selection in order to Play Well With Others.)

  • As the poster above pointed out-- the libc5 version has major problems with complicated table sets. Other Netscape problems:
    • The textarea widget leaks up memory like no one's business. If you're going to leave netscape open for a while, for god's sake don't leave it displaying a textarea widget!
    • Intermittently, Messenger (the only semi-functional IMAP client I've found for linux btw, for X) will go into some kind of loop, where it cycles using 100% of the processor, then 0%, etc about once per second. It also fails to get mail, frequently, stalls on IMAP connects, etc etc. Basically it needs to be restarted about every fifth time I check for mail.
    I'm getting really sick of netscape, myself. I wish there was another option.

    By the way, has anyone figured out what's different between 4.6 and 4.7? Besides the "Shop" button, that is. ALL the bugs I found in 4.6 are still in 4.7. What the hell was the point of that release?

    ----
    We all take pink lemonade for granted.

  • I've had X crash on me more times than I care to think about; it doesn't seem to like my laptop's mouse. Still, I've never once had it take down the OS with it; the worst scenario I've ever had was having to switch to a console and manually kill X-windows and every X process on the pid list.

  • Article text (Score:4)

    by konstant ( 63560 ) on Thursday October 14, 1999 @09:16AM (#1613034)
    You mean, two competing products are.... competing????

    Here is the text of the gigantic image:

    Bumpty Ride

    Buckle up. If you're still using that "free" X server that came with your Linux distribution, well, hazardous conditions lie ahead.

    The X Server is the graphics sub-system in a Linux or UNIX installation. It is more than twice the size of the Linux kernel and much, much busier. Critical communications, fonts, drawing, windowing, mouse, keyboard, memory functions, and more all depend on the X server.

    When the X server "falls over" - crashes - the entire operating system goes down. And usually, the user unfairly blames Linux itself.

    To make your graphical Linux all that it can be, you need a commercial quaklity X server that's proven itself in thousands of mission-critical applications. An X server that delivers the full power of your graphics hardware to your LCD or monitor in the form of crisp, clean, and fast images. For all that, you need Accelerated-X.

    Unmatched stability. Lightning-fast graphics. Superior performance. You'll find accelerated-X is like a fresh set of tires on brand-new blacktop. Want a test drive? Steer your browser to our website.

    -konstant
  • You're right of course. XiG has the right to promote their product any way they see fit. However, Linux and OSS advocates do have a right to object to this type of lowball marketing and retaliate in any way they see fit. While we can't (and shouldn't) attempt to legally stop this type of advertising, we should show our displeasure by turning potential buyers on to other products. Just put them out of business :)

  • Re:crash? (Score:3)

    by valdemar ( 21900 ) on Thursday October 14, 1999 @09:19AM (#1613051) Homepage
    Well, they are only seperate in name. The X server runs as root and has full access to the hardware on the system, it can even disable and enable interrupts whenever it likes. Thus, a bug in its low level driver code would be the same as a bug in the kernel. It could happily walk all over kernel data structures. Or even if the driver was ok and the code that called it was buggy and told it to DMA a chunk of video memory into kernel space, there would be nothing to stop it.
  • At least Microsoft just spouts sunshine about itself.

    I think I just spurted Mountain Dew out of both nostrils or something.

    That was great.

    -Brent
    --

  • Easy way to differentiate themselves? (Score:4)

    by MrHat ( 102062 ) on Thursday October 14, 1999 @09:19AM (#1613064)
    In my opinion, the major advantage Xi Graphics, Inc. has over the Free Software Community is their willingness to sign non-disclosure agreements which, though they effectively tie the product to a closed-source model, allow for a fuller featured and more hardware-specific X server, not a more stable X server.

    Yes: it's corporate mudslinging at its finest, a vain attempt to differentiate themselves from the free "competition" by including terms that the public can identify with (like "stable", "secure", and "fast") that have very little technical merit. A page explaining NDA agreements and the politics of the situation wouldn't make a real convincing ad, and would prove that Xi is doing little more than attempting to translate a political advantage into an economic one.

    My 2e-2 cents...
  • X really is shit.

    ...

    The guys at Xig Graphics know how to write X Servers.

    So are you saying that they know how to make good servers for something that's still shit?

    Or are you saying "X" when you mean "XFree86"?

    At least some posters in this thread, when they say "X is shit", are referring to the X Window System, rather than to a particular set of server implementations for it; are you saying

    1. X, in and of itself, sucks, but XiG manage to make servers that make it suck less;
    2. X, in and of itself, dones't suck, but the XFree86 servers suck?

    (I'm not taking a position on whether X sucks or not; I'm just asking whether you think using XiG's servers is sufficient to make it not suck, or whether the real answer might be "use something other than X", e.g. Berlin [berlin-consortium.org]?

  • A serial interface in other words?

    Get any computer... An 8088 with no harddisk will work and you only need 9600baud anyway, install something like Procomm on it and read the appropriate docs on how to setup your box for access via serial port. I would suggest a 286 with a 3.5" floppy though, easier to find a diskette compatible with it :). You'll also need a serial cable, probably the null modem variety.

    I think you'll find this solution better than hunting for a genuine dumb terminal.

    Where to find this junk? You're a nerd, you should know ;-) Fleamarkets are a good bet. You'll be looked at like an idiot for buying "useless junk", but they have never heard about people who don't need windows to get their work done.
    --
    Leonid S. Knyshov
    Network Administrator
  • I now have a different graphics card, and I'm back on XF86 (those vmware accellerations are hard to beat), but I wouldn't hesitate to go to a commercial X server if I started having problems again. Nor should you.

    That's a bit of a religious issue. If you believe in free software and the philosophies behind it, that's a very strong reason not to go commercial.

    If I were having trouble running my graphics card under X-Free, and I had $150 with which to rectify the situation, I would have no trouble deciding what to do. Buy a new graphics card with better XFree support.

    I don't use commercial software when there's a viable free alternative. Nor should you.

  • Accel X is not that stable either (Score:3)

    by Kesha ( 5861 ) on Thursday October 14, 1999 @09:23AM (#1613075) Homepage
    I have AccelX 5.0.2 for Linux.
    It crashes on the SiS 5598 chipset at random.
    XFree86 3.3.5 at least stays up.
    I would not mind their add compain if it was
    completely, but I have examples of the contrary.
    XawTV has fits starting up under AccelX running
    on S3Virge/DX, something about their
    implementation of DGA is screwy. And the PS/2
    MS IntelliMouse on my server works for only
    minutes at a time, then the mouse pointer shifts
    to the corner and any mouse movement results in
    random pointer movements and button presses. I had
    to go back to XFree86.

  • MIRROR of the whole ad... (Score:3)

    by Neuracnu Coyote ( 11764 ) on Thursday October 14, 1999 @09:24AM (#1613086) Homepage Journal
    Click on the link [inlink.com] for the ~371k jpg.
  • They're trying to advertise their product like every other company does.

    Well, some other companies may well advertise their product[s] in a clueless fashion, so "like every other company does" doesn't necessarily mean "in a fashion that shouldn't be roasted".

    Methinks "our product is better, because it's not a piece of free software, it's Commercial-Quality Software" may not be the best approach if you're trying to sell to a community of people running an operating system made out of, err, umm, free software....

    I.e., it's not clear that

    [The X server] is more than twice the size of the Linux kernel and much, much busier. Critical communications, fonts, drawing, windowing, mouse, keyboard, memory functions, and more all depend on the X server.

    is in and of itself a sufficient reason to believe that "free software does a good job" applies to an OS kernel and OS libraries (Linux and glibc, say) but not to an X server.

  • Considering that... (Score:4)

    by Scott Francis[Mecham ( 336 ) on Thursday October 14, 1999 @09:25AM (#1613092) Homepage
    ...as of AccelX 4.1.2 they still had a "dissappearing/corrupting" mouse cursor problem reminiscent of a MIT-SHM bug(very annoying when using Blender or the Gimp), couldn't use DGA extensions, and couldn't drop below 640x480 resolution. The only reason I ordered it in the first place was to support my i740 card, and when the XBF project produced an XF86 driver two weeks after I ordered it..
    It _is_ faster than XF86, and you do get a nice splash screen, but XF86 is more feature-rich, IMHO.

    Also, I could be mistaken, but it seems that the version of Accel-X I had didn't install any X source. When I compiled xanim for the first time, I had an error, and the author of xanim pointed out the problem--in the XF86 libraries that were still installed on my machine.
  • I don't know what mags this ad's been running in, but sure bet it is probably something like PHB World or something. It is just a bunch of superlatives connected to some semi-meaning[ful,less] nouns and verbs by heaping bucketfuls of business-speke. "Accelerated-X is like a fresh set of tires on brand-new blacktop."

    What kind of analogy is that? This ad probably appeals to people who like that computers that come with built-in cupholders.

  • most programs stopped working, it didnt store libraries and fonts in right directories and dselect keept bitching about dependencies (it thought i didnt have X installed on my system)

    I don't seem to remember seeing those problems on my Debian partition at home, but I didn't install XiG's libraries - I bought it for the server, not for the client code (at the time, XFree86 didn't, as far as I know, contain support for the Number Nine Revolution IV-FP card; amusingly enough, I have XiG to thank for discovering that XFree86 later added support, as they had something on their Web site, as I remember, comparing Accelerated-X and XFree86 performance with that card), so I'm just using the XFree86 client code that came with Debian.

    Debian doesn't start up xdm on my home machine because it doesn't think XFree86 has been set up, but that's about the only place I've seen where Debian was unhappy about Accelerated-X.

  • Does it? It drives me nuts that I can't cut and paste from emacs to Netscape. If Accelerated X would fix that, it might be worth the money.

    D

    ----

  • I bought an X server because of this ad. (Score:4)

    by wahay ( 12517 ) on Thursday October 14, 1999 @02:29PM (#1613109) Homepage
    Unfortunately for xig, I bought MetroX, but I will vouch for Xfree86 "falling over". It happens people. It may not happen to you but it does happen.

    When I was running Xfree on my Matrox Mystique card, I would have daily system lockups where the keyboard, mouse, and network all went down. Interestingly, linux really didn't, as proven by my still-running cron jobs, but the system was all but unusable (a solipsistic turing machine). It wasn't until I saw xig's ad that I put two and two together. Once I installed MetroX, I had uptimes of a month or more. Just goes to show you that you really don't want a buggy X server, whoever makes it.

    I now have a different graphics card, and I'm back on XF86 (those vmware accellerations are hard to beat), but I wouldn't hesitate to go to a commercial X server if I started having problems again. Nor should you.
  • I've used AcceleratedX for 7 months now since they offered support for a particular laptop graphics chip that Xfree didn't. The installation/configuration process is nothing like Xfree. I had a working server config in about 30 seconds....whereas Xf86setup can still sometimes take an hour if i switch to a different monitor.
    XiG tends to have support for chips 3-6 months before Xfree, and the server itself is much faster. Sure, $150 was a lot to pay, but if I waited for the open source version, I would have been carrying around a $2500 vt100 ....
  • Strangely enough, I commented to Xig back in August that them putting down XFree86 in their ads was making them less trustworthy in my opinion, and it made me less inclined to buy their products. Here's their reply:

    Actually, the motivation for the direct comparisons to XF86 are simply done to indicate to folks considering using Linux in a corporate desktop environment that there is a commercial alternative to the free graphics sw they get with their favorite Linux distribution. XF86 has achieved its primary objective of delivering a modicum of graphics support for the Linux hacker/enthusiast. The problem is that it isn't good enough to garner corporate blessing on the desktop (we know this first hand). Unfortunately, most recommenders/decision makers in the corporate sector come from the microsoft paradigm - graphics is part of the OS. So, when their Linux desktop locks up, crashes, runs slowly they incorrectly determine that Linux isn't ready for the big leagues yet.

    We know this isn't the case. And we're faced with the need to deliver this message in as direct a manner as possible to educate the consumer we're trying to reach (namely a corporate recommender/decision maker). In other words, we're working very hard to help the Linux hacker/enthusiast get Linux into his/her company. We've found this to be the most effective vehicle for capturing mindshare for Linux at the IT manager/executive level.

    So there you go. Convinced? No, neither am I. That said, to a certain extent, they're right. Although XFree86 provides far more than a modicum of graphics support, AccelX is faster, and the design of AccelX is much cleaner, with a single X server and loadable drivers. Hopefully XFree86-4.0 should fix this. And like it or not, corporate customers like to give money away in exchange for peace of mind (whether justified or not). They really *do* think that paying Xig for an X server will mean less crashes. In my experience, both AccelX and XFree86 have crashed on me exactly once each, so both are pretty stable. Don't credit corporate types with logical thought processes -- they simply don't have them. If AccelX is a way to please them, then so be it. The advertising still smarts for the rest of us, though.

  • Competing? (Score:5)

    by Ledge Kindred ( 82988 ) on Thursday October 14, 1999 @09:34AM (#1613139)
    Well, sort of, I guess. In the sense that Linus is competing with Sun, Microsoft, HP, IBM and all the other OS manufacturers out there.

    The XFree project's goal is to produce "a freely redistributable implementation of the X Window System that runs on UNIX(R) and UNIX-like operating systems (and OS/2)." Slamming them in an ad campaign is kind of a cheap shot -- they're volunteers producing a product because they think it's "The Right Thing To Do", not to compete in a commercial marketplace...

    I think the point of the submission is that XiG is slamming a product that's provided gratis, free-of-charge, fo' no money, etc, and representing it like some third-rate software package when, for all experiences and reports, it's actually quite stable and useful.

    And keep in mind, the XFree project has almost certainly been a driving force behind Linux' acceptance and popularity. Think about it: would as many people have been so likely to start using Linux on a regular basis if the only X server available was commercial and cost at least $100? I know I wouldn't have.

    I wonder if XiG is worried that XFree 4.0 will come out and give them a real run for their money, for no money.

    -=-=-=-=-

  • Putting drivers in the kernel does not magically confer stability; the code is only so good not matter where it is. In fact, if it's in user space, a program (be it SVGALib, X, whatever) has fewer prvileges and therefore has less of a chance of screwing up the *really* important stuff. X crashing and dumping you to the console is not nearly as bad as a kernel panic!

    That being said, there are tradeoffs. Because userspace graphics need direct access to the hardware, they need to run setuid root, which means security issues. SVGALib is especially problematic because it's actually "foreign" code, linked against the library, that runs as root, rather than just the server (or xdm) in the case of X. I think it deals with this fairly intelligently, though, dropping root privileges at the first possible juncture. It's still not perfect.

    Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty

  • It depends a bit on the number of complaints lodged with the Advertising Standards Authority, and how quickly they act. Sometimes, a ban on a specific advertising campaign is only issued -after- the campaign has finished.

    Othertimes, the ASA will avoid taking action, because the company in question has launched an illegal advertising campaign -in order- to be banned. (This happened with the Club 18 holidays, a few years back.) The publicity the press give such a ban is often greater than that which the adverts gave, and all for no cost.

  • link to the people who are advertising (Score:3)

    by TheDullBlade ( 28998 ) on Thursday October 14, 1999 @09:40AM (#1613165)
    Just in case you wonder who these people are, their web page is at http://www.xigraphics.com. [xigraphics.com]
  • No way am I relying on binary-only software for such a crucial part of my system.

    Maybe I'm spoiled, because I have a Matrox Millennium G200, but XFree86 works great!

    --
    Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page [slappy.org]

  • xig should fire their marketers: this is foolish! (Score:5)

    by FreeUser ( 11483 ) on Thursday October 14, 1999 @09:44AM (#1613175)
    We use xig's AcceleratedX 5.x to provide multi-headed support. However, it is not at all stable with Red Hat 6.1 (though it is fine with Red Hat 6.0 and Debian 1.2). If you want an example, try running kpackage, then slide the scroll bar for the package tree up and down. You'll be logging in and rebooting remotely in no time!

    We use AcceleratedX because it works with our multi-headed hardware today, but we are keeping a very close eye on XFree and anxiously awaiting 4.0 and xenerama as a possible replacement down the road, with plans to switch when XFree 4.0 is stable and well tested.

    AcceleratedX's strengths are its early access to hardware specs (providing support for hardware XFree doesn't) and the features it offers today which XFree doesn't yet (multiheaded support being the critical one for us). It is IMHO very foolish of xig to sling mud like this. Their market is comprised of Linux users, many of whom (myself included) take offense at that kind of ridicule against an Open Source project, especially when the ridicule is nothing more than FUD of the worst kind -- something Linux users and administrators are very good at seeing through.

  • Negative Campaigning (Score:4)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak AT yahoo DOT com> on Thursday October 14, 1999 @09:44AM (#1613179) Homepage Journal
    It's common enough in the US, although it's banned between companies in the UK. (The British believe that if a product can't be sold on it's own merits, you've no business selling it.)

    Competition by negative campaigning often backfires and, even when successful, can lead to a more apathetic audience, which can actually lead to fewer sales in the long run. (Voting figures are a good example of this. The years of negative campaigns run by politicians have carved away from the number of people who can be bothered to vote. Why bother? Much the same happened in the UK, during the Thatcher Years.)

    The only way to be successful, and KNOW you're selling a good product, is to sell on merit, not deficit. If people buy your product, because they believe it does what they want, and keep buying, because it DID what they want, you have a good, long-term future. On the other hand, if you DO get people to buy, because they believe everything else is so much carp, you stand to lose your entire customer base when the competition shatters the illusion. They only have to do so once.

    A company is never stronger than it's foundation. A foundation of bullshit and FUD doesn't offer much security.

  • Have you ever used the XIG servers?? (Score:5)

    by HamNRye ( 20218 ) on Thursday October 14, 1999 @09:47AM (#1613184) Homepage
    I won a copy of this program from Linux Today. It turned out to not be the laptop version (which I needed at the time)(Darn Neo-Magic) but it was the desktop version instead. All of my Linux machines have Matrox Millenium II's inside, and I was actually noticing more crashes on the machine with the XIG drivers. I noticed 2 crashes in the first month. (!) The machine was still accessible over the network (only for a reboot), but was unresponsive to any of the std. escape sequences. For comparison, I maybe crashed Xfree twice in a year previously, and the process was always killable with an escape seq. or a top over the network. After two months their CD was being used as a drink coaster. Add in the inconvenience of a less than intuitive setup, and no real performance benefit that was noticeable, and now I only reccommend their package for cards that are unsupported by the base distro.

    I would also like to add that I did at some point in the proces need tech support, and I never got through on the telephone, and I never recieved an E-mail that was not an auto-responder. Now a newbie needing install support would not be able to get it from his Distro provider, and no response from XIG?? That sounds like a lose-lose situation.

    In the interest of fairness, the Matrox acceleration is the best among the Xfree servers, and other people using ATI or such might experience different results. This experience that I relate happened ~1 1/2 years ago, so the state of their customer service and/or their drivers might be quite different. (But the the Xfree SVGA server has gotten better too...)

    Other points of interest: Since Xfree SVGA is open source, you can diagnose and fix any driver problems yourself if you know how. But then I hardly think that this ad targets folks with know how... This is just another case of FUD.

    Jason Maggard
    hamnrye@mindspring.com

    "I went mad for a while, It did me no end of good..."
    -Z. Beeblebrox
  • This ad definitely plays on the FUD aspect of "free" software as being unsupported. Kind of a cheap shot, but not entirely ineffective towards non-techies who question open-source software reliablity and support. These folks might buy into Xig's gig just because they are promoting support.

    Intrestingly, they imply the size of the X server versus the kernel make it automatically suspect. Microsoft, take note....

    The ad also implies the X server is an intimate part of the OS as opposed to being just an application. That itself is incorrect, but to a non-techie, it "appears" to be that way (ie. if your windows start dying, your system must be crashing). And that may be all that counts.

    Even given that X itself is extremely stable, I've lost work on it when it has died. KDE and GNOME probably haven't boosted anyone's confidence level when dealing with X either, but if asked by management, I'd dismiss the ad out of hand (but start mumbling about a stable window manager).


    -S. Louie

  • Impressions after using Accel-X for several years (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 14, 1999 @10:09AM (#1613195)
    I started with Accel-X when I upgraded to a new machine with a Matrox Mystique card. At the time, the XFree86 SVGA server was somewhat unstable with the Mystique and it lacked a lot of features and acceleration. I still have Accel-X 4.X with a Matrox G100 on my main computer, but I switched to XFree86 on my other box when I got a TNT card for it. Only Accel-X 5.0 supports the TNT and I haven't been compelled to spend another $50 for an upgrade.

    Anyway, here are my impressions of the product:
    - Accel-X is easier to install and configure than XFree86.
    - It is significantly faster than XFree86 on most cards, and extremely fast with Matrox cards.
    - It seems to be a little better at garbage collection, or is more memory efficient, or both.
    - Accel-X is very stable with my cards. Of course, so is XFree.

    Accel-X 5.0 also has an integrated TTF server which saves a lot of pain. Overall, I'd have to say that I've found Accel-X to be a better X server than XFree86. So if there was no cost involved, and no hassle of ordering and waiting for them to ship it to you, I'd easily choose Accel-X. However, XFree86 has improved quickly. Two or three years ago, they were so far behind in speed, features, and hardware support that I wouldn't consider anything but Accel-X. Now, I find that the advantages of Accel-X are not enough to compel me to upgrade.

    Anyway, I wouldn't worry too much about Xig going under due to XFree86. They still have a performance edge, and much of their market comes from supplying X servers to other operating systems. Before Linux, they got into business selling replacements for the abysmal X server in SCO UNIX. Metro-X, on the other hand, is really going to dissapear quick. Accel-X was always much, much better than Metro-X and now even XFree86 is probably better.

  • The thin line b/w cluelessness and stupidity (Score:5)

    by Lucius Lucanius ( 61758 ) on Thursday October 14, 1999 @10:10AM (#1613206)

    This phenomenon seems to pop up with amusing regularity in the 'nix world. Every once in a while, some marketing genius comes up with the brilliant idea to jump on the popularity of the open source bandwagon by.......showing how their product is proprietary and and thus superior. It's really difficult to say if they are just clueless or somewhat thick.


    Free hint to marketers - if you're trying to target free/open software customers, DON'T TRY TO IMPRESS THEM BY SAYING YOU'RE THE OPPOSITE.

    Look at the above statement and think real hard. Repeat till done.

    L.


  • If your X has never crashed, then you're a very lucky person. My XFree86 crashes maybe once every few weeks; I think it does that when some other app fills up the memory. Sometimes opening some menus halts the X, totally, with no way getting out except reset button.

    Well, even my Solaris OpenWindows (or whatever) has crashed maybe once a year, so the situation is not THAT much better with commercial servers.

    And crashing is not the only problem. XFree86 is severely bloated; typically some 25-30M, at least with the i740 server. The practical upper bit plane limit for this card is 16 (24 works badly, 32 doesn't work at all).

    And other problems: being able to change the number of bit planes is simple even in m$ Windows, although it too sometimes requires booting the machine. Having to restart X between changes is almost the same as rebooting, as all windows are lost. Changing the resolution of the X display also sucks. You get this awkward "virtual screen", that is awful to use. Even Windows has always handled this properly.

    XFree doesn't support session control in the same way that the new HotDesk does (I think); you can't just "suspend" the X as you can do with screen(1), and then move to another terminal and reattach the suspended X session there.

    Speaking about session control, KDE has some sort of trivial session control that saves the windows when you log out, and restarts them when you log in. Which, of course, is so buggy that it messes up everything if the machine or X crashes; then, it forgets all the window sizes and opens them in the first desktop.

    ...and so on...I find it very scary that so many trivial problems exist with X, and haven't been fixed during its very long lifetime. Is X dying of old age?

  • I end up with it crashing on me about 5-6 times a day,
    I've had very few problems with Netscape on my Linux box - but I run only the standalone browser, and an older version (4.05, IIRC).

    Although Netscape did just cause my my Worst Linux Crash Ever yesterday - after running for a few weeks (yes, weeks), it ate all all my memory and took down my X server and my login shell. Still didn't crash the OS, though. Meanwhile, at work my PowerMac gets completely hosed by Netscape on a regular basis. (Well, it's got to be either Netscape or Apple's CD player...)

    Too bad the Chimera [chimera.org] browser isn't in development anymore. I used to run it on NetBSD about three years ago - basic browsing functionality, small, fast, stable, extensible.

  • Re:Actually ... (Score:3)

    by Score Whore ( 32328 ) on Thursday October 14, 1999 @10:15AM (#1613213)
    XFree86 is severely bloated; typically some 25-30M, at least with the i740 server.


    One thing you may not be aware of re: bloat is that the mmapped video memory is included in the various reported sizes of the XFree86 process. I don't recall right off hand how much is allocated on the i740, but on the ET6000 16 MB is allocated, even though the chipset is physically limitted to a 4 MB frame buffer. This is because of the way that the hardware works.

    Many i740 cards have 8 MB frame buffers, and there is probably some slop in there for MMIO. So that is responsible for a lot of the apparent bloat.

    -sw
  • you need a commercial quaklity X server


    Seems to me like they're preaching to the wrong group. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with commercialware, but saying that running a "Commerical Quality" XServer on Linux seems to be a slap in the face of Open/Free/Whatever software.

    What's good for the Kernel isn't good for the X-Server?
  • "and no real performance benefit that was noticeable, "
    You are pushing it here ...
    I used Matrox Mystique and now G 200 and in both cases performance increase was very noticeable.
    I did have to run x11perf or anything liek that -it was simply visibly faster.


  • I've only had an X lockup that totally froze my computer about 5 times ever. My video has been nuked a few more times, but the SysRQ keys still successfully did a clean boot on the system.

    SysRQ-E (send TERM to all processes)
    Wait until disk activity stops
    SysRQ-I (send KILL to all processes)
    Wait 2 seconds
    SysRQ-U (remount all filesystems readonly)
    Wait until disk activity (if any) stops
    SysRQ-S (sync all disks)
    Wait until disk activity stops, minium 2 seconds
    SysRQ-B (reboot)

    And it's all good.

    * SysRQ on ix86es is Alt-PrtSc
    * If nothing seems to happen when you press the keys, try doing the SysRQ sequence again, it sometimes gets sticky.

    --------
    "I already have all the latest software."

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