cjdb@ellis.uchicago.edu (Charles Blair) (04/17/91)
I've fired up the above X server on an AST Premium 386/16 under MS Windows 3.0. Scrolling is very slow. Is this normal with X server implementations on the PC? (I know this is not network slowness, for a number of reasons.) The problem is the same with the HCL-eXceed Plus product running under MS-DOS. E-mail responses preferred; thanks. -- Internet: chas@uchicago.edu
cjdb@ellis.uchicago.edu (Charles Blair) (04/30/91)
In article <1991Apr17.030825.17172@midway.uchicago.edu> cjdb@ellis.uchicago.edu (Charles Blair) writes: > >I've fired up the above X server on an AST Premium 386/16 under MS >Windows 3.0. Scrolling is very slow. Is this normal with X server >implementations on the PC? (I know this is not network slowness, for a >number of reasons.) The problem is the same with the HCL-eXceed Plus >product running under MS-DOS. > >E-mail responses preferred; thanks. Thanks to everyone who responded via e-mail. I thought I'd summarize recent developments, for anyone else who might be considering this product. First of all, I am very satisfied with it, and with Hummingbird's tech support. After some tweaking of my system, I now have an acceptably fast product for my purposes. My benchmark is xeyes -- if the eyeballs follow the cursor without perceptible delay, that's fast enough for what I need to do. (Stuff that's heavily graphical, like xwave, which I got from comp.sources.x, is still slow, though one can at least tell what it's _supposed_ to be doing.) My conclusion is that for people like myself, who are trying to put together platform-independent information access systems that are primarily character-oriented, a 386 PC running at 16 MHz is a sufficiently good platform for X. (I'm running it in 8 megs of memory; my next test will be on a 386 SX with 4 megs of memory, same clock speed.) Motif in colour is great -- I use my PC in preference to working at the Sun console now, despite the smaller monitor. I'll be testing XView and XSight as soon as we get them in-house. (I think XVision only makes an MS-Windows product.) If the performance is comparable, my comparative evaluation will be based on how easy the products are to configure. The Hummingbird product allows complete reconfiguration of the keyboard (for me, the value of this is in allowing me to redefine Caps Lock as Ctrl), allows me to use FTP Software's kernel, and XDMCP -- it's great to be able to get users into the X session right from the start, achieving complete independence from character-based terminal emulation modes. -- Internet: chas@uchicago.edu