rhealey@umn-d-ub.D.UMN.EDU (Rob Healey) (02/16/90)
In article <15830@cs.yale.edu> yarvin-norman@CS.YALE.EDU (Norman Yarvin) writes: >Lenny Tropiano writes: >> I probably not the correct person to comment on this, but doesn't X11 have >> quite a bit of networking code in it to handle X windows over a network >> medium. Since the UNIX pc doesn't have any "great" network, other than >> STARLAN, wouldn't it be wise to remove this from the X server? Could this >> be done to keep the X applications and server down in size? I still don't >> know if this will make it feasible for the UNIX pc. > >I don't know. But if anybody gets the total size of X (server + xterms) >below 1 MB, I will be very surprised. Many people out there only have 1 >MB, and few have more than 2. The BIG problem is the UNIX PC's virtual address space, not the amount of physical memory. Why try to make the UNIX PC run both clients and server? Start out small and have it run a special server. Work out the applications later... See other posting for more foolish ideas. Just me raising rabble again, -Rob
alex@umbc3.UMBC.EDU (Alex S. Crain) (02/16/90)
In article <3220@umn-d-ub.D.UMN.EDU> rhealey@ub.d.umn.edu.UUCP (Rob Healey) writes: >>I don't know. But if anybody gets the total size of X (server + xterms) >>below 1 MB, I will be very surprised. Many people out there only have 1 >>MB, and few have more than 2. > > The BIG problem is the UNIX PC's virtual address space, not the > amount of physical memory. Why try to make the UNIX PC run both > clients and server? Start out small and have it run a special > server. Work out the applications later... Why is it that when people hear "X Windows" they go crazy? I've run X on a sun 3/50 with 4 megs and a disk. Its not particularily plesent, but if you've gotta talk X, it'll do. The unix-pc is not a 3/50 and most people don't have 4Megs My machines have 3.5 and 1meg, respectively, and I feel like thats alot). I don't think that a window system is unreasonable, but I also don't think that X is the answer. What I want out of a window system is: 1 pixel boarders. multiple fonts. better menues then the UA fast. use the entire screen (including the bottom inch) X gives me this, and a whole lot more that I don't need along with tons of overhead. I don't want to turn my machine into an X terminal, I want a local environment to do some kernel hacking and lisp development on. The UA is slower then snail snot, the window borders suck, and I can't use the whole screen. There is a window system that gives me what I want and I think that it would benifit others if lots of people use it (compatability, don't you know). Its called mgr, it's free, and it runs on this machine. If its missing something, we can get together and fix it, and its very tangable. Think about it.
yarvin-norman@CS.YALE.EDU (Norman Yarvin) (02/16/90)
In article <3220@umn-d-ub.D.UMN.EDU> rhealey@ub.d.umn.edu.UUCP (Rob Healey) writes: > The BIG problem is the UNIX PC's virtual address space, not the > amount of physical memory. Exactly the opposite, in my book. The Unix PC's virtual address space is 2.5 MB per process; that's big enough for X. And all the processes don't have to fit in 4 MB; some can be swapped out -- and your swap partition can be pretty big. On the other hand, virtual memory is _slow_. If your program doesn't fit in real memory, it's not going to run fast: witness the case of those .5M/20M machines which took 5 hours to compile programs that took 30 minutes to compile on 3b1s. > Why try to make the UNIX PC run both > clients and server? Start out small and have it run a special > server. Work out the applications later... You are proposing using the Unix PC as an X-terminal. That would certainly be possible, but doesn't do much for the local machine. And you'd have to run through the serial port, unless you had an Ethernet card -- the serial port would slow things down further. A comparison to a 4 MB diskless 3/50 (68020 machine) is much less valid than a comparison to a Sun/2 (68010 at 12 MHz). And X was too big for the Sun/2, at least in one friend's experience. Now, about what can be done. For my uses, the current window driver has 3 main drawbacks. 1) You can't use the bottom lines of the screen. (You can use the top line, if you try hard enough.) 2) Window borders are _way_ too big. 3) Window resize/move/select is too hard. How to fix these? Well: 1) This would require some serious hacking of the window driver: one would have to disable routines that wrote to the bottom of the screen, and modify bounds checking for window creation. Possibly one would have to expand the amount of memory allocated to each window -- but changing that would be incredibly hard. 2) This would require even more serious hacking of the window driver, to fix properly. A workaround, though, is to always use borderless windows; that's how my system runs. (You get used to it -- and it helps a lot if the windows are misaligned by half a character size.) 3) Yet more hacking of the window driver... but there is an alternative: changing Mike Ditto's keyboard driver to output to a user process when mouse buttons are pressed and the meta key is down (for instance). This user process would then resize windows, etc. Well, sounds like it'd be easier to port Mgr... Norman Yarvin yarvin-norman@cs.yale.edu "I can't really represent the size of the sun on the blackboard, but this should give you a good idea."