Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2003 15:45:01 +0200 From: MC <mc@hack.org> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Ugly Huge BSD Monster Message-ID: <867k4q6l5u.fsf@fuckup.hack.org> References: <20030902051334.6de9da27.kitbsdlist2@HotPOP.com> <EF8A605A-DD06-11D7-BDAD-000393D46EC6@freebsdgirl.com>
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Randi Harper <sektie@freebsdgirl.com> writes: > Have you SEEN the X11 spec? Yes. It's freely available, as I'm sure you know. It's not that long, btw. It's all the extensions that make the usual X11 server these days so large. Most of them I'm sure the avarage user doesn't need. > If you have to write a window manager, I've heard it's a bloody > nightmare. Really? Why? There's even source code for a simple window manager included in one of the O'Reilly X books: Volume One: Xlib Programming Manual, chapter 14. It's not very long, either. What /is/ cumbersome, however, is dealing with colour in X, but that's usually easier these days. > Read the Unix Haters Handbook. I have. It's true that early implementations of X servers were unstable and very large for the hardware they executed on. Things, however, have changed a lot since then. I'm not saying the X Window System is perfect. Not at all. For a long time I, myself, kept to running Bellcore's MGR as a window system on my Sun workstations. I even tried to maintain MGR and ported it and various MGR utilities to Solaris and Linux/SPARC. The modern XFree86 servers, however, are rather nice, have plenty of support for graphics hardware and are based on modules. You can comment out lots of modules, such as support for PEX, OpenGL and whatnot, and have your X server start much faster and be rather small, memory wise. -- MC, Temple of the Moby Hack - http://hack.org/~mc/
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