[comp.sys.amiga] X11 for the Amiga?

sam@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu (Your Friend Sam Moore) (08/25/88)

Is there a port of X.11 for the Amiga? If so, where can I get it.

Sam Moore
sam@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu

mike@shogun.cc.umich.edu (Michael Nowak) (08/28/88)

In article <2123@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> sam@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu (Your Friend Sam Moore) writes:
>
>
>Is there a port of X.11 for the Amiga? If so, where can I get it.
>
>Sam Moore
>sam@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu

Yes, Dale Luck has both servers and clients running on Amigas.  He was
proudly showing it at Xhibition '88 in Cambridge, MA last week.  It was
running on Amiga 500s and 2000s with Ameristar Ethernet boards (to
access clients on a Sun next door).  It also ran with a flickerFixer
and the Hedley monitor (on sepearate machines).

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phil@titan.rice.edu (William LeFebvre) (08/29/88)

In article <2123@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> sam@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu (Your Friend Sam Moore) writes:
>
>Is there a port of X.11 for the Amiga? If so, where can I get it.

A friend of mine recently visited the "X-hibitions '88" trade show.  He
saw a preliminary version of X-11 for the Amiga, written by GfxBase (a
company started by Dale Luck, who was apparently the person showing all
this stuff at the show).  This is all second-hand information.  The
GfxBase X-11 setup has a server and a small number of clients.  The server
currently only supports the monochrome model, but it supports the standard
Amiga display as well as the Hedley monitor.  One of the 2000's had only
one floppy drive and ran X-11 fine, once the fonts were loaded into RAM:.
Each X machine had an Ameristar Ethernet board in it and programs on
different machines can communicate via the Ethernet (no plans have been
made to support serial communication).  Programs on the same machine use
Exec's message-passing primitives.

The piece of information that really impressed me was that it was designed
to co-exist peacefully with the Workbench and Intuition.  X runs on its
own screen and can run at the same time as the Workbench.  Thus you can
hop back and forth between them.  In fact, you can have several different
X screens running simultaneously, each of which contains its own windows
and is handled by its own window manager.  Standard screen scrolling still
works.  I'd like to see a Mac version of X do that!

Amiga X-11 version 1.0 is just now entering beta test.  Dale has not yet
ported the X library to any native Amiga C compiler; he uses the
Greenhills cross compiler on a Sun.  Commercial release is planned for
early next year, and should be in the prince range $200 to $300.

Hope I didn't steal anyone's fire!

			William LeFebvre
			Department of Computer Science
			Rice University
			<phil@Rice.edu>