I used X-windows in school lab today

[amexblue]

I used X-windows in school lab today. It is pretty coool. How can I install X windows on my win2k?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

it's called X11, not x windows, there are quite a few commercial x servers for windows, try a google search - or you can install cygwin.

 

[Wolfie]

Isn't Xwindows for unix boxes??? At least that's what I remember....

 

[ScottMac]

X is kind of a funny thing ... the part that the user uses is the SERVER, the part that runs on the computin' box is the CLIENT.

SO you put an X server on your client to talk to the client process on your server ......

X is a wunnerful thing. Eats bandwidth like a ( * ) though .....


FWIW

Scott

* - fill in the blank with something that eats a lots of stuff.

 

[pm]

There are a lot of ways to run X on a PC. The two most popular are probably to install some form of Unix OS like Linux or FreeBSD, or to download Cygwin's free XFree86 port for Windows. The former is more powerful/better, but is more work to do. The latter is pretty easy but once you get it running, it isn't capable of doing much.

Installing Linux is pretty straightforward in modern days... better than I recall back around 1993 or so, anyway. Buy or download your favorite distro and run from there.

To play around with X without the work of repartitioning your drive and installing a new OS, you could try installing Xfree86 for Windows from here.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: ScottMac
X is kind of a funny thing ... the part that the user uses is the SERVER, the part that runs on the computin' box is the CLIENT.

SO you put an X server on your client to talk to the client process on your server ......

i dont doubt that you know this, but i wish to clarify for everyone else, since i myself was very confused about this for a long time.

there is no "x client" persay. you have the x server, which is xfree86, or a windows x server, or whatever. it is the framework for running x apps. the x apps themselves are the clients. saying "the x client" is just saying "a program which runs in x", like mozilla, or whatever.

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
there is no "x client" persay. you have the x server, which is xfree86, or a windows x server, or whatever. it is the framework for running x apps. the x apps themselves are the clients. saying "the x client" is just saying "a program which runs in x", like mozilla, or whatever.

Maybe put it this way... the clients and servers we're talking about are processes, not machines. You can have multiple X clients (and less frequently multiple X servers) running on one machine.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: cleverhandle

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
there is no "x client" persay. you have the x server, which is xfree86, or a windows x server, or whatever. it is the framework for running x apps. the x apps themselves are the clients. saying "the x client" is just saying "a program which runs in x", like mozilla, or whatever.

Maybe put it this way... the clients and servers we're talking about are processes, not machines. You can have multiple X clients (and less frequently multiple X servers) running on one machine.

and to get more convoluted......

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
it's called X11, not x windows, there are quite a few commercial x servers for windows, try a google search - or you can install cygwin.

I thought it was the X Windowing System (originally developed at MIT or was that the Y Windowing system or whatever? ) version 11 release 6...

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
it's called X11, not x windows, there are quite a few commercial x servers for windows, try a google search - or you can install cygwin.

I thought it was the X Windowing System (originally developed at MIT or was that the Y Windowing system or whatever? ) version 11 release 6...

i dunno, but i do recall hearing some hoopla about how x windows has never been a name it goes by

i just say x11 when referring to just "X", and xfree86 when referring to.....xfree86.

 

[drag]

X windows is X window there are a lot of different versions. Most of them are commercial, but the most common for desktop users is from the XFree86 project which comes with Linux and most BSD's. X windows ISN'T a gui, its a network protocol.

The window manager is what provides the gui-ness, usually the default one that comes standard is TWM or something and it sucks thats why we have nicer ones like kde and gnome. If you didn't have a WM then all you would be staring at is that crapy gray sceen with all the dots. Remember in Unix land each program has a specific purpose and it does it well. One program to take your input/output. one program to interact with the network, one program to get websites, one program to control the icons each has its own very seperate job.


Think of the TCP/IP layered protocal design were each layer has it's own protocol has purpose and is kept seperate. So all a developer has to worry about is the input and outout of his program, not how each specific program that it may possibly come in contact with. Ideally everything in a Unix box should work that way.

It is kinda of awkward at times, but it leads to stability and versitility. compared to windows were "windows" does everything, and if on part brakes, say your tcp/ip protocal stack gets broken or your modem drivers crap out, more than likely weird things are going to be happening on your desktop, like scrambled icons and it will eventually crash the entire computer. In Unix you would just kill the offending program and start it up again or replace it with a better one, 90% you don't even have to reboot. (like Gentoo were you can surf the web using a text browser or play console games while actually installing your OS at the same time!) XP and w2k has attempted to copy Unix's way of doing things and XP is pretty unix like with multiple users and all, but it still has a long way to go to catch up with linux or freebsd.

X windows is very old. It was around before even dos came out. People were plugging away on 1240x768 resolution high end unix workstations when the windows/dos crowd were wetting their pants over 640X480 ega graphics (include me in that a 386 was a very good thing to me!). X11 refers to the fact that this or that version of X window was loosely based on the 11 version of X that came out in the mid 80's or some freakish thing like that. If you must know the current version of X window is X11R6. But it is more of a tradition than anything nowadays.

Since it is so old the idea of a server and cleint model thing we are familar with wasn't realy established to well in the minds of the developers, (probably cause they they were high on pot and inane geekyness).


A X server is you collective input and output devices. Think of mainframe type situation. The keyboard and monitor arn't actually part of the computer they were add-ons to make programming easier. SO a x server is you input/output. Like a consule, your command line interface is not actually the computer OS its a add-on for your benefit and so X windows.

They client is the computer that uses the input to spawn programs and operate and so on. Most of the time it's your own computer but it can just easily be anything that can impliment the X windows protocol. I use my 200mmx laptop as a server and my 1.13g desktop as the cleint that way I can run stuff like mozilla and things on my laptop with out croaking, plus when i play games i can use the laptop to play mpg songs, control the cdplayer volume, download crap, all of it using my desktop's power and hardware resources (sound card/harddrive etc etc)without even interrupting my quake3 game!

client --- does the proccessing
server --- does the input output. (think of it serves your keystrokes and you monitor input to a client machine)

kinda stupid, but thats what it is.

 

[civad]

Cygwin with XFree86 should help...and with windowmaker.

Windowmaker on Windows...sounds nice doesnt it?

 

[n0cmonkey]

KDE and Gnome are not window managers. The most current version is X11R6.6.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: drag
Remember in Unix land each program has a specific purpose and it does it well.

that applies most of the time, and especially with command line utitilites (cat, echo, grep, sed, awk, wc, tail, head, cut, etc..) but for emacs, gnome, and kde, that's not really the case. the latter are basically being used to woo windows users, and as a result are suffering from alot of the same problems as windows itself.

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
...but for emacs, gnome, and kde, that's not really the case...

Actually, GNOME still follows the model relatively well. The GNOME architecture is very modular, with each piece having a well-defined purpose. Which is precisely why several libraries (e.g. libIDL and libxml), while originally developed for GNOME, were picked up by other projects - those components served a well-defined purpose, which made them easy to pick up and develop with.

Now, there's no doubt that the whole of GNOME is awfully complex, which leads to some problems. One project gets held up (e.g. gnome-vfs), and it stalls features (e.g. menu-editing) in other parts. But the ideal is to keep the modularity of "classic" Unix and build a comprehensive desktop out of it.

 

[drag]

Yep. Of course the Unix model of layered protocols and services isn't perfect. It makes it a little harde to understand. Like why do I need 4 different programs running just to get my email? Stuff like that. Plus it leads to inconsiticies to running stuff that is reletivly simple in windows. Like thinks about if X window is a network protocal and runs in sockets and stuff how the hell do you implement Hardware acceleration? You must chew thru the layers of stuff to run stuff, but there are workarounds. Every day people are figuring out better and newer ways to do stuff.

One good example of this is ALSA and OSS. OSS is the traditional way for free unices to impliment sound on their boxes. It is decent and will give you good sound but has severe limitations on what it can do. Like you can have only one sound for each device, like you could have the cd player and quake3 going at one time, but you could not have a radio program running thru realplayer and quake3 at the same time. Now they overcome these limitations by running sound deamons like esd or artsd that wouuld allow you to run serveral sounds and mix them together for OSS's /dev/dsp, but (especially with esd) the quality is not up their and you ran into sound lag. Also for modern sound cards with new features OSS is not usually able to implament anything unusual without some weird hacks to it. You could always buy OSS/comercial drivers but these were not the best either. Now here comes ALSA (advanced linux sound architecture) drivers, these are much more flexable and allow modern sound cards to do what they are designed to do.
Hardware mixing/midi/surround sound and all that.

The trouble is of course that OSS is implemented in the 2.4 kernel and is easy to use, while in order to use Alsa you have to setup around 8 modules or so to get it to work and is a major undertaking for any person not acuanted with compiling kernels and dealing with modules. Once you get it to work it is very gratifing because it is possible to attain levels of performance that is superior to many windows drivers. Now just a couple years ago ALSA was a new and buggy API , but in kernel 2.5 it is replacing OSS and in 2.6 it will be ready for the mainstream. So once people figure out something better it is possible to use it without having to revamp the entire OS.

 

[Nothinman]

t is decent and will give you good sound but has severe limitations on what it can do. Like you can have only one sound for each device, like you could have the cd player and quake3 going at one time, but you could not have a radio program running thru realplayer and quake3 at the same time.

That's a limitation of the driver, not OSS. The emu10k1 driver that drives my SBLive handles multiple open()s just fine without assistance from esd or artsd.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

t is decent and will give you good sound but has severe limitations on what it can do. Like you can have only one sound for each device, like you could have the cd player and quake3 going at one time, but you could not have a radio program running thru realplayer and quake3 at the same time.

That's a limitation of the driver, not OSS. The emu10k1 driver that drives my SBLive handles multiple open()s just fine without assistance from esd or artsd.

woah, slashdot flashback :

 

[Nothinman]

Hahaha