[comp.sys.amiga] 2500UX/Purchase Query - X Windows

andrewt@watsnew.waterloo.edu (Andrew Thomas) (12/16/89)

In article <118@cbmcats.UUCP> ken@cbmcats.UUCP (Ken Farinsky) writes:

   Did everyone see color x-windows running on the ULowell board under
   unix at the toronto WOC?  1024x768, 256 colors.  It was only a
   technology preview, but it looked good!

   Perhaps we'll lose the "game machine" image.


For the non-believers out there, I was at the Toronto show.  They had
SYSV3.2 and SYSVR4 running on two machines there.  The SYSV3.2 machine
was also running color X windows.  The window manager was uwm (gag)
but the important point is that it was running standard X stuff.  It
was X version 11 R3 as far as I could tell.  There were several X jobs
on the machine: 2 xterms, puzzle, mandlebrot generator.  The response
time from the Unix was better than our microvaxes, or sun3/160, or sun
3/50 - most comparable to our sparcserver.  The response from X was
slower than R3 on a uvax, except for text which really flew, but
faster than on a sun 3/160.  The demonstrator was telling us about
using GNU Emacs on the machine to do her editing in an X window,
taking her files off a Vax750 (780?) file server via NFS because her
Amiga had so much better response time.  This fills me with hope.

The only negative observation I could make about the X implementation
is that they had not figured out everything about the cursor.  It
occasionally left square grey blocks if it was moved while X was too
busy.  I did not get to see any imaging.  I also did not see X running
under SYSVR4.

Neither system showed any signs of flakiness except the previously
observed cursor problem.

--

Andrew Thomas
andrewt@watsnew.waterloo.edu	Systems Design Eng.	University of Waterloo
"If a million people do a stupid thing, it's still a stupid thing." - Opus