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Re: The X spaghetti was Re: Linux vs. Microsoft



Moshe Cohen wrote:
> The communication between the client applications and the X server is done
> through the network using the so called X protocol.

Indeed it is called "X protocol" (described in O'Reially's "Volume 0"),
but not
necessarily over the network.

> Xt/ Motif are GUI libraries written on top of Xlib. There are also other less
> popular toolkits. I don't want to get into this subject but just note that Motif
> is on top of XT, but there are other toolkits that can be on top of Xt).

You must mean "there are other toolkits on top of Xlib", don't you?

> (My main point in the previous discussion that this network architecture is
> costly, and not utilized today so much, because most users have their own
> desktop that runs both the client applications and the X server (see "X
> terminal" below))

And that's the main point I want to correct you about - when the
connection is
local (DISPLAY is ":0.0", without a host name), the communications are
done though
UNIX-domain sockets and, most of the time today, shared memory to pass
large
structures like bitmaps.  I don't know how it is implemented in Lose32,
but I'm
pretty sure that this mode of operation is as fast as you can get.

> 
> What is an X terminal then? An X terminal is a piece of hardware that has a
> keyboard, mouse and graphic display and a processor that runs only an X server,
> nothing else. It is a special purpose computer with no OS running.
> Ten years ago they were quite popular because they were cheaper than a

Ten years ago the where no X terminals.

Also someone else's claim that there were no desk-top computers when X
was
developed are false too - X was developed by MIT on donated Digital
desktop
computers as part of a much larger project - Project Athena, who's heart
(as far
as I followed it) was around the concept of a per-user desktop "network
point".

--Amos

--Amos Shapira                      | "Of course Australia was marked
for
133 Shlomo Ben-Yosef st.            |  glory, for its people had been
chosen
Jerusalem 93 805                    |  by the finest judges in England."
ISRAEL               amos@dsi.co.il |                     -- Anonymous


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