dumais@nixter.UUCP (Paul E. Dumais) (03/27/90)
I _hate_ people who post a follow-up to the entire Net when they have very little to add to the conversation. OH GOD I HOPE I'M NOT ABOUT TO DO THE SAME! MacX. David Fry wanted to know 5 things in his original posting: 1)MacX with A/UX 1.1.1. 2)MacX available 3)MacX versus X11 (native X) 4)Resizing X screens. 5)X11 on a Sun versus MacX or X11 on a Macintosh. 1)MacX requires the Communications ToolBox which was not available until A/UX 2.0. More importantly, if MacX were to run with A/UX 1.1.1 it would be the only process that the user could communicate with. In A/UX 1.1.1 you can have 1 Mac O/S Application running and it takes over the screen. The A/UX daemons continue to run in the background but the Mac O/S application is the ONLY forground application. Reason; the ToolBox code is non-reenterant. Only one process can use the code at once. Under A/UX 2.0 the single process MultiFinder uses the ToolBox to allow many Mac O/S applications to run. In both 1.1.1 and 2.0 native X11 takes over the screen. 2)MacX should be available now. If it is not, then it WILL ship the same time that A/UX 2.0 ships. When you order X Window System for A/UX 2.0 you receive the X11R4 display server and the MacX display server. 3)MacX is just one of the (possibly) many MultiFinder processes running in one *single* A/UX process slice. Obviously that will not be quite as well serviced as native X running in its own process slot. The trade off comes when you find that you are more productive in the MultiFinder environment. With MultiFinder you can cut and paste between Mac O/S windows (MacWrite, Excel, MacX etc...) and A/UX windows where you may have text from a database or flat file (vi, emacs). 4)MacX uses the Macintosh WindowManager. Anything that you can do with a Macintosh window you can do with a MacX window, they're the same. Resizing, Zooming, Closing whatever. Even the cdev WindowShades1.1 works!! (for those who don't know WindowShades will roll your window up into the TitleBar when you double-click on the TitleBar. Very cute.) 5)I now have a MacIIfx with A/UX 2.0b8 and I will go head to head with any Sun running X11. One thing though, you HAVE to have 8 Mb of RAM for sure. Fast disks would help. The 80Mb external drives from Apple are not fast. Get the Apple 160 or fast 3rd party drives to see this machine FLY!! Finally, MacX is very cool if you want X Window clients on the same screen as your Mac O/S applications and your Console sessions. It is pretty shocking when you see how radicaly different an application works under Motif than OpenLook. There really is only one widely accepted windowing standard. Macintosh. Now we have X11 with the Macintosh WindowManager. Like John Sculley said; "This is only the begining....." -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Paul E. Dumais:A/UX Specialist:Apple Canada Inc.:+1 416 474-9872 | | "Where *does* he get those wonderful toys - The Joker" | --------------------------------------------------------------------------
pnm@goanna.oz.au (Paul Big-Ears Menon) (03/28/90)
dumais@nixter.UUCP (Paul E. Dumais) writes: ... >Finally, MacX is very cool if you want X Window clients on the same screen as >your Mac O/S applications and your Console sessions. Great. So when do we see MacX running on the Mac O/S only? The rumour mill started with last Q '89, then 1st Q '90. Now the latest is 3rd Q '90. What's the poop guys? I want to hang on to my Mac, but I need X too (without the o/head of AUX). Paul Menon pnm@goanna.cs.rmit.OZ.AU
mikel@goofy.apple.com (Mikel Evins) (03/29/90)
Obviously I can't say anything about when MacX will be available. I can say that I have used it, and it is very handy indeed. If you can't wait for the release, you might look at White Pine software's eXodus product. --me In article <3029@goanna.oz.au>, pnm@goanna.oz.au (Paul Big-Ears Menon) writes: > dumais@nixter.UUCP (Paul E. Dumais) writes: > ... > >Finally, MacX is very cool if you want X Window clients on the same screen as > >your Mac O/S applications and your Console sessions. > > Great. So when do we see MacX running on the Mac O/S only? The rumour mill > started with last Q '89, then 1st Q '90. Now the latest is 3rd Q '90. > What's the poop guys? I want to hang on to my Mac, but I need X too (without > the o/head of AUX). > > Paul Menon > pnm@goanna.cs.rmit.OZ.AU