XFree86 has the proud honour of announcing that unlike other technologies that have come and gone, it is now officially 10 years old. What makes this particularly adventful is that it is fully backwards compatible; this is a true testament to the spirit of the original X protocol of which XFree86 is its finest implementation. “Yes there will be parties. Yes there is an international reunion, but sorry, by invitation only. You can wish us well at the xpert mailing list. And don’t forget to ask for pictures.” the site notes.
XFree86 Celebrates Its 10 Years
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I just wonder if it’s gonna take another 10 years for them to write some sort of configuration utility for it. As much fun as it is editing the XFree config file, I’m ready for something new.
Most people belive X to be very slow and take alot out of a computer. When it was first release hardware was no where near where it is today. How well did X run, seams like it would have sucked the live out of the computer and made it not able to do much else?
I just wonder if it’s gonna take another 10 years for them to write some sort of configuration utility for it. As much fun as it is editing the XFree config file, I’m ready for something new.
I really don’t know they don’t publicize it more, but XF4 already comes with a combined graphical and textmode setup utilty. It’s called xf86cfg (and has no relation to the fairly dire xf86config). Type
xf86cfg
and it’ll try and probe your hardware and start a minimal X server so you can complete the configuration with a GUI or
xf86cfg -textmode
and it’ll start a (textmode) curses based menu driven configuration tool.
XF86Config
Which is OKish.
But even after playing w/ these, your are normally “recomended” to edit the file by hand to make sure.
The news post says by invitation only, qho would that apply too- the xfree86 developers?
for the (poor) results achieved.
Better to buy a comercial X windowing to run graphics software on Unix-like systems. Check http://www.metrolink.com (maybe I will get a binary soon for US $50).
“I just wonder if it’s gonna take another 10 years for them to write some sort of configuration utility for it. As much fun as it is editing the XFree config file, I’m ready for something new.”
Eww… X is already a relic of the past. Hopefully we won’t still be using it in 10 years. I would be extremely surprised if we were. I fully expect to see Linux and FreeBSD have integrated GUI systems long before than.
And who said that open source projects take a long time to mature …
XFree STILL has a long way to go …
>>Eww… X is already a relic of the past. Hopefully we won’t still be using it in 10 years. I would be extremely surprised if we were. I fully expect to see Linux and FreeBSD have integrated GUI systems long before than.
The day linux comes with an integrated gui will be the day i will look for something else… And if you really want an “integrated” gui then noone stops you from using the framebuffer. I can see lots of arguments in favor of keeping X, but none really in favor of getting rid of it.