TheRaven64's Journal: X11 - The reason I haven't bothered to migrate from Windows.

Recently, I got a new (meaning second hand) SMP box to play with. As I mentioned, my first act with this box was to boot it, look at Windows XP, say `eeew' and replace it with FreeBSD. This box now sits in the corner (the corner of the hall, not my room, so it can be on 24 hours a day and not irritate anyone).

The reason I got this box was (mainly) so I could move all of my files onto a server, allowing me to access them from whatever OS I was using on my desktop. My desktop currently dual boots Win2K (NTFS) and FreeBSD (UFS) and neither of these operating systems is capable of both reading from and writing to the partition of the other (FreeBSD can read NTFS, and may be able to write to it but doesn't really trust itself to). This could be solved by converting one of the file systems to FAT, but that would leave me without proper file permissions. The other alternative was to use SMB and NFS sharing from another box. This seems to work better (and was increadibly easy to set up on FreeBSD). This has now been done.

Next, I was intending to stop using Windows on my desktop. This I have completely failed to do. The reason for this is that Windows is actually not a bad Desktop OS. On the other hand, it is not a very good workstation or server OS. FreeBSD, on the other hand, is a superb server / workstation OS, but not quite there as a desktop OS. Most of the time, this would not be a problem, since my desktop is often used as a workstation. And it is here that X enters the picture.

X was originally designed to allow graphical workstations, powered by a single computer, over what would now be regarded as quite low bandwidth links. Over 100Mbps, it is as if I am using a local machine. The version of XFree86 which ships with the cygwin distribution performs admirably, and I am in fact typing this from within Opera 7 (Linux edition) running on a FreeBSD box, posting the display to a windows machine. This allows me to do anything that is better done on a *NIX box (i.e. real work. The gnome postscript viewer is much nicer than the windows one, and most of the time I am using (g)vim and a postscript viewer) as well as everything better done on a windows box (games, for example, and I still haven't found a *NIX Jabber client that is as good as JAJC). As a result, I now have no real incentive to move from Windows (although I do plan on getting a powerbook or iBook at some point in the future). Although I do sometimes feel a little silly using a 1.33GHz box as (more or less) a dumb graphical terminal.

One question though:

Does anyone know how to make gnome2 either not start nautilus, or not use the root window?

I use the X server in rootless mode, but since nautilus still then creates a root window, this is less than ideal. In multiwindow mode it is not fast enough to be usable (not sure why this should be. I may have a go at hacking it at some point). As a result, whenever I give focus to the X server, it eclipses everything on my screen, with the exception of windows set to `always-on-top' mode (which is trivial with my graphics card drivers), so I end up making any Windows windows float over my X desktop. Not a huge problem, but not a particularly good solution either.