Who Needs XFree86?

An anonymous reader writes "With this review Linux and Main says it is kicking off a project to put together a Linux machine that operates entirely in the console, including applications, without the user ever having to enter anything at a command prompt. The review is of Twin, the very cool windowing environment for the console. Applications will be added over time, and readers are invited to nominate their favorite little-known console applications."

Just like windows

Linux machine that operates entirely in the console, including applications, without the user ever having to enter anything at a command prompt

Sounds like Windows NT/XP/ to me.

OMG, there will be nothing stopping normal people using Linux if this comes true...

X (and other Window systems) reduce productivity

In my experience, firing up a windowing system
tends to reduce productivity. A simple text
based console app allows you to focus w/o
disractions.

In years past, I knew of someone who used
emacs as his login shell :-)

---eludom

Re:X (and other Window systems) reduce productivit

In years past, I knew of someone who used emacs as his login shell :-)

I don't know what's more frightening, that he did or that you can.

Re:X (and other Window systems) reduce productivit

Obligatory:

The only thing he found wanting in emacs was a good text editor :)

Re:X (and other Window systems) reduce productivit

You are all pussies. I patched my kernel thusly:

-- main.c Sun Jun 3 22:02:34 2001
+++ main.c~ Tue Jul 10 16:05:26 2001
@@ -789,9 +789,9 @@

if (execute_command) execve(execute_command,argv_init,envp_init);
&nbs p; - execve("/sbin/init",argv_init,envp_init);
- execve("/etc/init",argv_init,envp_init);
- execve("/bin/init",argv_init,envp_init);
- execve("/bin/sh",argv_init,envp_init);
- panic("No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.");
+ execve("/usr/bin/emacs",argv_init,envp_init);
&nb sp; + execve("/usr/local/bin/emacs",argv_init,envp_init) ;
+ execve("/bin/emacs",argv_init,envp_init);
+ execve("/usr/bin/xemacs",argv_init,envp_init);
&n bsp; + panic("No emacs found. Are you sure this is GNU/Linux?");
}

Copyright

Re:Emacs bloat

The RSS size of my current Emacs process is 12MB, VSZ size, 15MB. This process is also my IDE, mail and news reader, file browsers, etc and occasionably, web browser. What is the size of your Office XP process? And yet, that is modded as "insightful". Idiocy is doubly amusing, if not sad.

Step futher?

Why not directly boot up Emacs? .-)

Re:Step futher?

Huh? Why would you want to do that - Symbolics Lisp machines already had an excellent editing substrate called EINE (EINE Is Not Emacs) and later ZWEI (Zwei Was EINE Initially). Zmacs, the LispM editor, was using those and is possibly still more advanced than the Emacs of today.

You can take a look at The Symbolics LispM Museum [uni-hamburg.de] for more information and pictures.

Re:X (and other Window systems) reduce productivit

In my experience, firing up a windowing system tends to reduce productivity. A simple text based console app allows you to focus w/o disractions.

Let's assume that you are right. But if a simple text based console can improve productivity, then what can a GUI (that means one background image and 12 Xterms) do to your productivity?

Well, the other side of the medal is that in our daily work we are usually forced to do more than one thing at the same time. And for that I really prefer to have some virtual terminals on my graphical desktop, so I can use the power of the text console and multiply that power by using it on several tasks simultaneously.

kind of neat

it reminds me of the early 286 days just before GEOS game around wayyyy before windows... norton commander looked very much like that (without the adding of applications)

Me? I think X is fine... If I can scale it down to fit on a floppy WITH my kernel and ramfs filesystem (tinyx) then it's perfect for me.

AA support?

Does it support AA and alpha chanell? .-)

Re:AA support?

Yep, full ascii art support.

Also with a hardware radio tuner and the right country of residence you can get
alpha channel! [m-sat.bg]

Re:Yes..

You know - maybe it's not so perverted after all - if it can use framebuffer and somebody sometime will implement AA into FB... who knows...

This is cool.

This is probably one of the coolest things I have seen in a long time. The possibilities are endless.

If you have an older box, you can make it a very serviceable desktop. My only question is, does anyone have any information on the kind of resources it requires?

Ah memories...

Reminds me of the old Windows 1.0 days... Looked just like that, except not as advanced. This looks pretty cool/useful,if you're going to be using console. Personally, console always holds a special place in my heart. =D

Re:Ah memories...

Reminds me of the old Windows 1.0 days... Looked just like that, except not as advanced.

Actually it looks very little like Windows 1.0 (speaking as someone who actually used it - for work). Windows 1.0 didn't have overlapping windows, but was graphical. Twin is the opposite way around.

It is very strongly reminiscent of Quarterdeck's DESQview, screenshots circa 1988. It could run textual and graphical apps side by side - pretty revolutionary (in the PeeCee world) for the time.

Rich.

Two questions

1. I dont need a windowsystem on a server, console (commandline) works fine.

2. If I am going to use the box as a workstation, why do I want to use something ugly that makes my eyes bleed?

I can't find a valid use for this sort of system. Can anyone?

Re:Two questions

Hey!

You can easily run X on a 333 Mhz machine.

I use a PII 333 as my server and desktop, and I have very little incentive to upgrade.

If you want to give an example of a bitty box you can't run X on, pick something lower down in the pecking order.

Any Pascal coders here?

Count the flashbacks to Turbovision!

I do.

I need X because administration of Solaris machines all but requires it. If you want to use any of the tools that Sun provides to make life easier (not knocking Sun, they do make life easier), then you need a machine running X.

Wow, I did the same thing!

In my day, I also programmed an app similar to Twin for DOS on my old comp. It was a pseudo-graphical app I used to login, launch programs, etc. it was basically my hub from which I did other things. Even had a screensaver (it was basically the date and time wandering accross the screen). Then I got a 286 with Windows 3.1 and forgot all about it (though I still used a different version of it whenever I got back to DOS, or during startup).

I basically forgot all about it when I got a Pentium with Win95 and Slack.

I need XFree86.

Dude, portability. As Zawinski put it, writing as an SGI user;

"Of course, all of the software I write runs on Linux; that's the beauty of standards, and of cross-platform code. I don't have to run your OS, and you don't have to run mine, and we can use the same applications anyway!"

XFree86 is conservative & lazy with regard to new features; as long as it implements the X protocol, who cares?

Directfb/fresco?

These two projects are trying to develop "real" alternatives to X.

Fresco is dead, but Directfb already has full gnome support, X emulation, mplayer support, alpha blending, and hardware accelleration and because it uses the same technology as the penguin logo on bootup, its fast!. This is a REAL alternative to X, and I hope you give it more support.

Directfb homepage [directfb.org]

No network transparency

Last time I looked at it, TWIN needed an X server or a pure Linux console - as in literally sitting in front of a machine running Linux on the keyboard. Telnetting or SSHing in wouldn't work.

Obviously, TWIN is so much faster than X because X can work over a network, and TWIN can't. How many people use network transparency anyway? Down with X!

Hint: this was a joke

Another angle..

The one of the ways for visually impaired people to use computers is via "braille screens", which in themselves struggle to render graphical displays.
This work will have the important consequence that visually impaired people will be able to do more than they currently can, the collection will make it much simpler to select the applications available. Great work which will make the world a better place.

Who Needs XFree86?

Anybody who works with graphics.

If your'e using gentoo.

just "emerge twin".

Text mode X server

and can be used as server for remote clients in the same style as X11

Does this mean it is actually an X server? Will it display any X application (ie netscape etc) in text mode? When he says the same 'style' does he mean it is compatible with the X11 protocol, or just similar?

Sound Like:

The Command Line is Dead!

Long Live the Command Line!

Should be called "The Lynx Windows System"

Depending on twin's weight I might actually try loading this onto a couple of remote servers I run. None of them have X. I'm wondering how well it would work over some of my strangely convoluted network paths (two internal and one external ssh jumps).

*Installs Chicken Wire Around Him And Wears A Helmet* I somehow doubt that it would outperform GNU/Emacs as my remote administration enviroment. Running Emacs within a twin window seems redundant.

Its like a DesqView for Linux.

there was a DOS application called Desqview back in the early 90s that allowed DOS to be a multy tasking enviroment. It aparance was simular to this in design, where you can have a windows like environment with out the gui.

plenty of toolkits like that already

back when most people were computing on vt100s, there were a number of toolkits like that. vt100s even have built in support for text windows.

Favorite console app

Bitchx, screen, links, ntaim, and vim.

time warp

not trying to bash here, but this kind of seems like a waste. this guy obviously has some good coding skills so there has to be something more useful he could create other than an app that looks like DOS. maybe i'm a jerk, but this doesn't look like it is advancing linux very much.

windows 1.0 screenshots [fsnet.co.uk]

Command line efficiency

Although I have misgivings about unused potetial of GUIs my best hope has always been with the command line, because learning to type is not that hard for many people and your instructions are coming from your head rather than a response to what must first be onscreen. My hope is this: that a windows interfacing program be written which accepts a well thought out set of console commands which directly manipulate and switch between the graphical windows on screen. Bang-like commands which move and arrange windows (get to know your coordinate space ;), open dialogs or pre specify what to put in them, search for buttons via their text and are of course scriptable. The impetus is of course to translate your wishes in thoughtform into screen movement. The closest thing we seem to have are key chords and the 'tab' key. Nothing would please me more but to see windows transforming around me through the latency of my typing movements.

Useful for Remote Server Administration

I know there have been times where I would have thought multiple windows running on my server in the same terminal screen would have been much more convenient that having multiple ssh's open. With this, It looks like I could ssh in and run this over the connection allowing me to perform tasks.

Re:Useful for Remote Server Administration

Sounds like you really want screen [gnu.org]. (Yes, it does split screen.

In related news

MS is launching a strategic project to allow fully text based operation of their famous desktop environment.

An MS spokesman commented: We knew very well but came to realize only too late that the command line interface is the mother of human/computer interface. Much like MS-Dos is the mother of mainframe computers.

The following is a sample of fully text based operation commands (TM) that have leaked from the MS laboratories:
- drag-mouse-imps2-to-point [X, Y] # Defaults to middle of "Start" button
- click-mouse-imps2
- click-click-mouse-imps2
- control-alt-delete [USER-NAME/PASSWORD] # Defaults to administrator's credentials
- start-application [APPLICATION_NAME] # Defaults to IE

Twin

If I can't use it to look at pr0n, I ain't interested.

Text usage

I use XFree86 just as a way of having mutliple consoles in a way I like to work. Yeah I could use screen if I wanted. However what about if I want to browse a web page such as my online photo gallery? Also taking performance of any moderm graphics card surely XFree is fast enough in 2D mode

Rus

can be more productive

Currently, I have an old laptop that I have been using for java development no less. I don't have X installed... just vim, j2sdk, and ant. Does everything I want. I have found that I am more productive. I tend to be one of those who tinkers with settings, etc, and becomes distracted. Not the case while developing in console mode. It may not be pretty, but I am productive. Also, being that the laptop is an IBM thinkpad with one of those wretched pointing devices in the center of the keyboard, it is defintely better than trying to use any windowed environment with that horrible mouse pointer beast.

My Pick

I move around a lot, and use SSH to log into my machine at home to continue working where I left off. The apps I use:

vi - IMO _the_ example of bad interface design, but it's fast once you know how to use it (actually, I use elvis, but I guess any vi-clone would do)

mutt - it's just fantastic. A little harder to use than pine, but a lot easier when you have many mailboxen (I have some maildirs and a couple of IMAP accounts)

w3m - ideal if you are on a slow machine. When run under X11 or on the framebuffer, it renders images, too

centericq - all major protocols, and file transfers. This is a program that would benefit from a point-and-click interface, though.

mp3blaster - Housemates flee in terror as the computer suddenly starts playing music while no operator is around ;-) Supports Ogg Vorbis and MP3

dcd - Yes, I have audio CDs, too

cdrecord - burning those ISOs so I can propagate Free software

abcde - Rip your audio cd, look up the track names (CDDB), and encode to your favorite format - with one command!

And, of course, the usual Unix commands, C compiler, yada, yada.

Cheers!

---
Qui in ventem urinat, se lavare constat.

MultiTail

If you're interested in something like Twin: you might like MultiTail: it enables you to view multiple files and/or the output of multiple commands in one terminal-window.
Link: http://www.vanheusden.com/multitail/ [vanheusden.com]

Description:
MultiTail lets you view one or multiple files like the original tail program. The difference is that it creates multiple windows on your console (with ncurses). It can also use colors while displaying the logfiles, for faster recognition of which lines are important and which are not. It supports regular expressions. It has interactive menus for editing given regular expressions and deleting and adding windows. One can also have windows with the output of shell scripts and other software. Also multiple files can be merged into one window.

Alternatively...

If you want to switch between console applications but you don't need a 'windowing' environment, you can use screen(1). What I do is this on every ssh login:

% exec screen -E '^Z^Z' -D -R

This brings up my applications exactly how I left them last time. Then C-z c starts a new screen, C-z 0 through C-z 9 switches between screens, C-z C-z sends a literal ^Z, and C-z d disconnects. I normally have pine running in terminal zero, XEmacs in terminal one, then top(1) and maybe a shell in two more terminals. This is much handier than having to start applications every time you log in, and essential over a noisy modem line where the ssh connection might suddenly cut out. If it does, just reconnect, run the above command and everything is just as you left it.

Speaking of Emacs, you can do most things inside that including making shell and terminal buffers, so in a way it provides a windowing system like Twin.

Has anybody read the review?

Twin is a non-graphical windowing environment!

Excellent

Wow...welcome to 1993.

Xine & Mplayer

Makes it kind of hard or watch videos doesn't it?

I guess I'll be watching the ascii version of Star Wars from now on.

A friendly console project!

What is wrong with KDE and GNOME interfaces? The fact that the console was never actually all that user friendly. I am not a Linux expert, just a mid-range user, and I notice debian packages for "dialog" etc. Why is it that more console tools do not use that mechanism to communicate with us?

I am personally growing convinced that issues that were not addressed in the console are also dismissed in the GUIs or at least they add to the habit of confision.

+ I love my crappy P200 with 640x480 and I love my Debian so this is nice.

Insane!

This is insane!
We are having every day more processing power (thanks to Moore's Law), and super-hyper-capable video adapters... and these guys come with an early 80's technology.
Come on, the people at PARC invented the GUI 30 years ago, and we are still discussing a text-only windowing system???
This system is not only awfull, but also innecessary.

Web hit counter

Go to the twin web site and just watch that web counter go....

I hope that it automatically goes to a 5th digit...

Somewhat XFree86...

Well, this isn't exactly getting rid of X but it would silence all the people who screaming about X's supposed bloat.

I just stumbled across Kdrive [jussieu.fr] (not related to KDE) which is a _TINY_ X server written by well know X hacker Keith Packard.

Here's a listing of top from the RULE [rule-project.org] (another cool minimal Linux project) web site running Kdrive and Moz. Kind of a funny contrast really. :-)

792 mfratoni 15 0 22756 22M 12384 S 15.3 59.8 1:19 mozilla-bin
720 root 15 0 7192 3600 1148 S 10.0 9.5 0:27 X

Awww... look [rule-project.org] at the little X server. He's so cute!

Here's a pic [rule-project.org]
of kdrive running the Gimp, Xfce (svelt file manager), some random apps and some pagers. That's just very cool to have all those apps running in such a mimimalistic environment.

YAXA?

Yet Another X Alternative? Must be Monday.

Seriously, people have been announcing plans to replace X with something lighter weight for roughly 20 years now. Every time one of the projects gets far enough along to slap together a web site and a half-assed demo, you guys fall all over yourselves to promote it.

This may finally be the project that gets it right, and 10 years from now it will deliver something that is generally useful. Until then, it probably doesn't need to be on the front page of /..

Step in wrong direction?

As computers are becoming more and more powerful, we can demand more from them. Do you not think this is more of a negative step? I can understand using this for older machines, but not new. Starting X11 shouldn't take very long on most computers (about 10 seconds on my Athlon XP 1700+) Just my two cents.

ARACHNE Fully Graphical Browser (& Internet Su

Any discussion of making the console a user friendly environment for the mouse wielding masses must take a look at the Arachne Web Browser and Internet Suite [arachne.cz]. Originally developed for DOS, and included with the FreeDOS distro, Arachne's creator has been working on a Linux port (based on SVGAlib & GGI lib) for a while now - but it is still a beta release. You can also of course run the DOS version in an emulator from the Linux console.

In addition to Web browsing and email, it can also be used as a front end for a media player capable of handling MP3's and some video. And ist can be used as a handy directory tool for browsing your own local files.

One criticism of it is the licensing it is released under - though this is partly due to tools created by others that were incorporated into it. But the author is a SlashDot fan [arachne.cz] so is aware of the concerns. The standard download is cripple-ware and free for personal use.

Ah, memories of Desqview

At least visually, Twin is reminiscent of Desqview.

Ah, the distant memories....Desqview on a DOS machine with a few megs of "Expanded Memeory" : Brief in one window, a Borland compiler in another, Lotus Magellan in a third window, and maybe a debugger somewhere.

Good stuff, all of 'em.

Gaming and multimedia, too

Don't forget the gaming [slashdot.org] and multimedia [slashdot.org] capabilities.

The selection is a little thin right now, but it's only a matter of time!

Apple ][ windowing

i remember the //e rom upgrade had some windowing extras built into it. the /// also had something similar. the mac pretty much killed it that progress. no login capabilites for the apple 2 series that i remember though

This is a great thing.

Now we just need a GTK port to it. Once you wrap the twin GUI with GTK bindings, all of the X11 apps that you have are now available. A toolkit is a toolkit is a toolkit. The graphic representation right now is solid objects, but that is just a look and feel. That can be changed. As long as you have the same programmatic interface that the app is expecting, you can change the look and feel of the app. Similar to skins, themes, but at the widget level. Most if not all of the gtk objects should be representable using text. Once you have that, there really is no going back. Zero effort for tons of apps that will run natively.

Midnight commander

What about Midnight Commander, a clone of the famous Norton Commander ???

It is, IMHO, the best interface design ever, i don't think you can get a better design than this one for managing files: two (not three or four or more: two) independent windows, pointing to different directories and list files in each, a bottom line representing what each F-key will do if you press on it, sticking to some rules about what a given F-key will do (for example: F1 means help and F10 means quit.) and still having a prompt to type commands into the same way you would do if you were at a plain shell.

It is THE killer console app: i can't live without it. :-)

Apollo Aegis and DM

I started something like this in the late Eighties on my Apollo workstation ( just befor HP raped Apollo). All it took was some cleaver rebinding of the mouse keys /w Apollo DM and Aegis scripts. I also rebound some of the function keys for special functions. By the time I was done, I could do most of the common tasks and execute "menu"ed programs in any consol window. I really miss Apollo. I wonder if any /. readers remember them. Now HP uses the name for their cheapest line of disposable printers. Sic transit gloria mundi.

nothing new here, curses(3) does it all

The review is of Twin, the very cool windowing environment for the console.

What's new here? Curses(3) does everything twin does, and has been around and heavily used since the 70s.

Screen(1) uses curses to support multiple virtual terminals on one physical terminal.

vi(1) uses curses for text editing. Very likely emacs(1) does so too.

Lots of text based admin programs out there, all using curses, eg, top(1), mpstat(1), watch(1).

And several of these programs use multiple windows a-la X, as curses supports that too and always has.

Re:Guess what, though?

that was on topic...the article asked for suggestions of programs you prefer that are command line programs.

Re:good news bad news..

"this not a troll I swear
The good news is that people are finally understanding that X sucks, X is ugly, slow, stupid, a big pile of hacks and rustry code."

Yes, it is a troll.

X is one of the primary reasons I like Linux (or any unix). I don't want a remote desktop. I want remote programs. I want to be able to ssh into any remote computer (including those I can't physically get access to) and run editors with the display pointing back to me. Not a desktop, just the editors. On a typical day I'll have programs (mainly terminals and editors, but the occasional graphics program) open from over a dozen machines, all happily cohabiting on my single desktop... This lets me work remotely - I can cut'n'paste between /etc/cshrc locally and /etc/cshrc remotely with ease. I like this. You can prise it out of my cold dead hands, and not before.

If it's ugly for you (I assume you mean aesthetically challenged, here), then get a new distro; you know, the ones with the anti-aliased rendered displays, and use a decent window manager. Frankly, if you're not prepared to put some effort in yourself, you deserve what you get.

It's not slow, at least not as far as I can tell, even my old matrox card (G450) can do several hundred 800x600 (typical game res.) blits/second, a semi-decent graphics card should do much better. The DRI really helped here, and decent drivers take advantage: if you're on a crappy graphics card, or one without decent support, change.

There has been work done (by the X team and others) to check how much faster it could be made by removing the (AF_UNIX not AF_INET) socket transport when you're running local. The result: The kernel unix socket code was as fast as anything the X team could do to transfer data around. X also uses shared memory (ie: zero-copy) to "transfer" images (pixmaps) from the client to the server when running locally.

(This is actually a quote from g4dget, but I agree wholeheartedly, so I'm including it)

Overall, the idea that network transparency is some sort of special feature that one pays a high price for is nonsense: all major desktop operating systems run in protected mode, and most GUI applications run in a different context from the window system. X11 simply has been designed that way from the ground up, while Windows and Macintosh have evolved there from "direct mode" graphics. Network transparency in X11 is not so much an issue of IPC or how it does graphics--it uses IPC like all desktop windowing systems--but in having well-defined network transparent support for features like window management and configuration information. It's lack of those features in Windows and OS X that means that Windows and OS X are not network transparent.

In practice, XFree86 is a damned efficient window system that, when it has comparable drivers for the graphics cards, beats OS X handily in terms of performance and memory usage, and usually even beats Windows.


Certainly stupid it's not. The concepts behind it haven't changed for over a decase, and have yet to be surpassed. It's true that the client/server model has changed over time, with far-more-capable framebuffers than X originally had to play with, but the X-server has evolved to cope with this - witness the various "extensions" that have become standardised...

As for "big FAT slow ass", TinyX (in the XFree86 source tree) takes a whopping 860k of space or so (depends on server-side pixmaps) when running on a zaurus. Whoosh. Almost a megabyte there. Whenever you see memory sizes in Linux, they invariably include the RAM in the graphics card (which is memory mapped so it can be used with shared memory) and the pixmaps that have been requested to be stored within server ram by clients. "FAT" it's not.

The take-home message is: Don't just complain. If it bothers you that much then get off your backside and do something about it - either do it yourself or cajole others

Re:Party like it's 1989

hehe, when I looked at the screenshots I too had a flashback of Borland Turbo C++ for DOS (which incidentally, I still have in the attic)

It's interesting and I like that you can use the multi console while in this windowing system..but I don't know, are people really that hard pressed for affordable CPU/Graphics horsepower? I could see this being used on server maybe, but not workstation..