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X Businesses GUI Apple

Making Mac OS X Work Like X Windows? 110

Posted by Cliff from the wouldn't-this-be-nice dept.
X Fiend asks: "Is it possible to configure Mac OS X's window manager to run in a client-server mode like X Windows? I'd like to use my (rather anemic) iBook as an X Terminal, with apps running on my (manly dual-processor) desktop machine, but I don't want to have to use X Windows to do it- I want to use Mac OS X's native window manager. Any ideas?"
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Making Mac OS X Work Like X Windows? More

Making Mac OS X Work Like X Windows?

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  • OboroOSX (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by m0rph3us0 ( 549631 )
    The closest thing I've seen to that is OroboroX which makes things look nativish. Or you can use Tenon X tools Click Here [tenon.com] which apparently is built using Carbon/Quartz
    • Sorry, I misread what you were asking. I think Xserve does something like this, so I imagine Mac OS X server would be able to do the same.

      • Re:OboroOSX (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You also mis-read Apple's page, too, then. The XServe is a piece of hardware, it doesn't handle this. OS X Server has remote admin abilities. What the guy is asking is whether or not he can run OS X like X-Windows -- ie.: he wants to open and run applications remotely, which is not part of OS X -- client or server.
        • You're 100% about that? Try opening up a terminal and running these commands:

          sudo su -
          open /Applications/.app/

          You should see...
          "
          kCGErrorIllegalArgument : initCGDisplayState: cannot map display interlocks.
          kCGErrorIllegalArgument : CGSNewConnection cannot get connection port
          INIT_Processeses(), could not establish the default connection to the WindowServer.Abort
          "

          I'm not saying this means it works... But it does kind of get me thinking. I just wanted to see if you could post some reference proving that the windowserver can't do it.
    • Even though it's not the true nature of the question, OroborOSX (that's the correct spelling) is a nice tool to complment XDarwin and make things look like Aqua. You can find it here [sourceforge.net]

      I would recommend its use for anyone at all a novice to X on OS X.

    • Tenon's Xtools is nothing more than a rebadged version of the original Xdarwin (Xfree86 on MacOS X) release, spiffed up with a rootless patch and a slightly improved control panel. For this, they wanted $200.

      Even if the price weren't a ripoff, you don't want it anyway: the current release has a substantial number of showstopper bugs, and they have yet to update to the XFree 4.2.0 codebase. The last update to Xtools was in December of 2001, and they appear to have completely abandoned the product since then. (The support boards on tenon.com are a rather unhappy place as a result; I wouldn't be surprised to see a class-action suit arise out of this.)
    • These solutions solve the problem of running X-Windows programs on the Mac... something that can be done by just installing X-Windows on you mac. (You'd just have to set the window manager up to look like a mac)

      Fact is the GUI isn't as UNIX like that I'd hope. Don't get me wrong, I love the interface and the GUI (despite a few small bugs) looks great. However, I think features similar to X, such as launching remote programs (either other mac programs or other X-Windows programs) would be great. One thing I love about linux is being able to type ssh -X host and be able to launch those programs on my X server.
      -Chris

  • Not possible (Score:4, Informative)

    by teridon ( 139550 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @06:24AM (#4695771) Homepage
    The closest you'll get to this is using software like VNC, Apple Remote Desktop, or Timbuktu to display the desktop's screen on your laptop.
    • What about NetBoot off of the Dual? that may work nopt sure though.

    • Re:Not possible (Score:2, Informative)

      by dalamcd ( 573483 )
      There's also an application from Haxial called RemoteAdminTool (RAT) [haxial.com]. It's available for Mac and Windows (I think a Linux version is coming soon) and it's free (as in beer). I've used it and it's not bad. Aside from displaying the screen, it also allows you to kill processes and restart/shutdown the remote machine.

      For those who are unaware, Haxial uses their own, incredibly ugly GUI for all their applications, with no way to get the native GUI elements. There's some explanation for this on their webpage, but it's poor and I honestly don't feel like finding it!

      dalamcd

      • My apologies. It's not actually free. It costs $20, but to the best of my knowledge no features are turned off in the non-registered version.

        dalamcd

    • I have a rack of Xserves and I need to be able connect to them in a graphical mode to access the desktop environment. I tried using OSX VNC, but the problem is that OSX VNC WILL NOT FUNCTION UNLESS A PHYSICAL MONITOR IS ATTATCHED TO THE GRAPHICS CARD.

      I find this surprising because ordinary X windows VNC servers can use virtual screens. I'm sure there must be some way of creating a virutal screen for the macs too because you can buy KVM switches that use the USB port rather than the Graphics adapter for the video display. Also I have found that if I plug a screen in to the graphics card, launch osxvnc and then unplug the screen that OSX VNC functions fine until the next reboot.

      Does anyone know how to permenantly fool or otherwise use aqua VNC on a mac without a graphics card attached. I contacted the folks maintaining OSX VNC and they would like to know of a solution too.

      in a large rack is sure would be nice not to have to attatch any keyboards or screens yet still have access to the aqua desktop on each machine.

  • Yawn. Here ya go: (Score:2, Informative)

    by torpor ( 458 )
    http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/faq.html

    This is one of the most useless /. articles, *EVER*.

    Go to www.apple.com. Hit the Search field. Type in "Apple Remote Desktop".

    'nuff said.

    Dude, its not karma-whoring ...

    • Re:Yawn. Here ya go: (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mithras the prophet ( 579978 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @07:20AM (#4695926) Homepage Journal
      That's completely uninformative.

      Apple Remote Desktop is a VNC or Timbuktu-like program, which pushes the (compressed) bitmap of a desktop to the client machine. While it can work for the situation the questioner asked about, it
      (a) is not a truely native solution, in which the API calls are transmitted rather than the bitmap of the screen, and
      (b) is geared towards education, where it can be used by a teacher to show a demonstration on a set of student computers.

      It also costs $300.

      NeXT's Display Postscript had the ability to run remotely, like X, but those hooks were abandoned when Apple converted the display model to Quartz/Display PDF.
      • the bitmap of the screen

        That's gotta suck based just on the Mac OS X pixmaps. People I know that use VNC regularly use a solid color background, solid color widgets, solid color titlebars to keep things light and usable...all that glitzy translucency and racing strips across everything wreak havoc on attempts to do an efficient pixel-pushing system.

    • Re:Yawn. Here ya go: (Score:4, Funny)

      by Space Coyote ( 413320 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @07:22AM (#4695932) Homepage
      That, of course, is the real answer. It is also no fun

      The fun comes in watching every karma-whore wax technical about different characteristics of the underlying technology that make it easy / difficult to implement feature X on system Y, while missing the original point entirely. Just part of the fun of reading /., really.

      • Here you go! (Score:3, Interesting)

        by SHEENmaster ( 581283 )
        OS X is just whoring the letter X as the X-box is. X was first used in a computer project in X10 and later X11(unrelated, but much more fun).

        If OS X is gonna whore the name around, they should do so with style rather than beauty.

        To the original author, just do what I did and install Linux on your iBook. If necessary you can run MoL [maconlinux.org] on your dual processing G4 and run it remotely on your iBook. I use MoL for programs such as Bryce and Flash MX with no trouble to speak of. Configuring networking will be a bitch, I warn you.
        • That's rather unfair. Mac OS X has legitimate reasons to use X--first, because it's the 10th full version of the Macintosh system software, and the Roman numeral for 10 is (*gasp*) X. It is, in fact, also built on a *nix-ish framework, that can, in fact, run X (it comes with XDarwin!). M$'s XP and X-box are completely different--simply leveraging the marketing of the letter X as being "cool", and perhaps as being associated with this great OS.

          Dan Aris

    • Re:Yawn. Here ya go: (Score:2, Informative)

      by sal ( 3052 )
      And you can do Windows too:

      Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac OS X [microsoft.com]


      Think of how productive you can be with local OSX Apps, remote OSX Apps, local windows Apps via Virtual PC, remote Windows Apps via WRD, local X11 apps on XDarwin, remote X11 Apps also with XDarwin and a VNC client for your Apple Newton's VNC Server. All on the same desktop.

    • What a jerk. Another classic case of king-of-the-hill, chest beating, Slashdot-reader snobbery. The guy just wanted an answer to a question, to try to broaden his horizens, not an insecurity-induced attempt to show techno-superiority.

      There are those who ask questions, and there are those insecure wannabe peons who delight in berating those who dare show any signs of ignorance.

  • In theory... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sco08y ( 615665 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @07:18AM (#4695912)
    In theory, all IPC is done through Mach messages, whether the underlying transport is TCP/IP or shared memory.

    In theory, you can intercept messages between two ports and run them through arbitrary filters.

    Since the window server process is nothing but another port to Mach, you *should* be able to catch everything going to it, send it over the network and have it appear on another Window Server on another machine.

    In practice there would be a lot of details to take care of like configuration and non-display. But the nature of Mach is that any IPC can be generalized to take place over any kind of network connection.
    • (BTW, I am horribly oversimplifying things, and haven't actually investigated the role the window server plays. I have no idea, for example, how Quicktime works.)

    • Re:In theory... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Leimy ( 6717 )
      Mach usually requires another special process to do TCP/IP message forwarding... my understanding is Mac OS X doesn't currently have this...

      You are correct about the design of Mach being such that it can operate on a network transparently. The caveat is you need all the appropriate pieces to do so.

  • Sloppy Focus (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I just want sloppy focus. Please someone, make this happen. Clicking in the window has been the hardest thing to get used to.

    • Re:Sloppy Focus (Score:2, Interesting)

      by TiMac ( 621390 )
      It'll never happen. Imagine Grandpa (or another extremely basic user) waving his mouse around and having it lose focus every time he accidently moves it. I know my Grandpa (who currently uses Win98...against my advice) would loathe this system, and I would have to explain it to him about 20 times before he understood it, and then he would probably just unplug the mouse while he was typing things to prevent it from happening.

      Sloppy focus can be nice for pro users, but its terribly confusing for novices, and it goes against Apple's beliefs.

      • Re:Sloppy Focus (Score:3, Informative)

        by Mark Hood ( 1630 )
        So do what Microsoft (unofficially) did - release a 'TweakUI' app which allows you to do this...

        That way, it's not something Joe Average can enable by accident, but those who want it can get it.

        Mark
        • Well, in case people haven't noticed, Apple is unfortunately trying to prevent people from modding the GUI in OS X, by making the Dock omnipresent and disabling 3rd party menu extras (sort of). Something tells me they'd never allow this sort of capability. It's hard to explain why I think that...but let's just say I have good reason. :)

          • Re:Sloppy Focus (Score:3, Informative)

            by Benley ( 102665 )

            There is a very good reason for not supporting sloppy focus in OS X. Think about it for a moment... How in the world would you get to the menu bar for an application without that app losing focus? It wouldn't be possible - whatever app you mouse across on the way to the menubar would gain focus, and you'd get the menubar for a different app. The only way to have sloppy focus be even remotely usable would be to add yet another interface hack to allow you to get at the menubar, such as a hotkey which locked the focus to your current window. Sounds kinda yucky to me, frankly...

            • There is a very good reason for not supporting sloppy focus in OS X. Think about it for a moment... How in the world would you get to the menu bar for an application without that app losing focus?

              You'd do it the same way you'd access submenu's sloppily (try it, you don't need to go into a submenu exactly where it touches the real menu, you can slide it over the desktop). You track where the cursor is going. If it's heading torwards the menu bar at a fairly high rate of speed then don't switch focus.

              • That would be the cool way of doing it :)

                The easy way is to wait for a significant pause in mouse movement. If the mouse stops moving over a window for more than a moment if becomes selected. The threshold time would be user definable in the same way that the double click threshold is.

                There used to be an old Mac OS 9 extension that allowed auto focusing called Mac Sloop which I have long since lost track of. Shame it never made it to Mac OS X.

                Auto-focusing is great in use with a graphics tablet.
      • It'll never happen[snip]

        It could be an option. The option to swap the left control and capslock keys on USB keyboards [macosxhints.com] is supported and that particular option tends to annoy the hell out of everybody except for old school Unix folk and people who use emacs. They could simply make it an option like caps/control swap that nobody would ever run across unless they were specifically looking for it.

    • Re:Sloppy Focus (Score:4, Informative)

      by foniksonik ( 573572 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @10:18AM (#4696879) Homepage Journal
      Go to Versiontracker and search for VirtualDesktop. This software besides giving you virtual desktops (up to 100 in a 10 x 10 grid) also enables 'focus follows mouse' which is in essence sloppy focus and works pretty damn well...

      try it you won't be dissapointed.
      • It doesn't let you drag windows across desktops, though...just stops when you hit the edge, IIRC.
        • Incorrect, actually. This may have been true in the 1.* versions, I don't recall; but 2.0 allows for edge-flipping desktops, switchable to happen either all the time, or only when you're dragging a window.

          It also addressed all my other concerns with the earlier version of the software, and happens to include a very good focus-follows-mouse implementation.

          While it's not an answer to the remote-display problem, I think that this tool takes care of just about everything else anyone could miss from X11 window managers. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
          • Hmm...interesting. Last time I used it it was like 3 years ago.

            Also, IIRC it was written (or this could be a very similar utility, hard to remember...could be what I'm confusing it with) by the author of one of the Mac's few malicious viruses. As a sort of atonement, he wrote a few pieces of very nice software, which he then released for free. Kind of cool.

            Of course, this was years and years ago, and VT appears to be $20, so...

            That being said, I agree with the endorsement. Once you've experienced it, using a system without multiple viewports is incredibly painful. It's a tremendously attractive feature. I cannot imagine how people get by on vanilla Windows (BTW, there's a fairly good page for Windows called JS Pager).
    • and i want the scroll bars on the right side: the left side is the right side for languages that read from left to right;-) and i want to be able to read from the top window while typing in a lower one...insisting on the active window on top is fine for novices, but at least knowledgeable users should have the option... xdarwin'll just have to do...

  • try VNC (Score:4, Informative)

    by constantnormal ( 512494 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @08:43AM (#4696208)
    here's a link for the only OS X VNC server that I know of:
    http://www.redstonesoftware.com/osxvnc/ [redstonesoftware.com]

    Other VNC servers and clients can be found at:
    www.realvnc.com [realvnc.com]

    It works, but you'd better be running a 100Mbps LAN with plenty of horsepower on both ends of the connection. OS X is a lotta GUI to be managing remotely.

    • Re:try VNC (Score:3, Informative)

      by diverman ( 55324 )
      Well, you need that bandwidth for the higher quality graphics. I run OSXVNC on my PowerMac at home, and access it from my PowerBook through my DSL line. Not quite 100Mbps, but in 8bit mode, I can get to the basic things I need to.

      Certainly not usable for primary work over such a slow connection. When I'm local, it's decent under the 11Mbps of 802.11b. But I have to agree, to be usable on a regular basis, 100Mbps minimum is needed. I can't wait for Gigabit switches to come down in price so we can really use the power of the network adapters in our Macs. :)

      -Alex
    • For a client, you might want to check out Chicken of the VNC [sourceforge.net].
  • What about a way to have multiple console users at the same time? WinXP has the rather nice feature where a second user can be logged on at the console at the same time as the first, without the first having to log out.

    Does anything like this exist for OS X? I know there is a notion of a "Console user" in OS X (e.g. default user id for mounting disks) which might hinder this ... any tips?

  • coming soon to a aqua screen near you? (Score:4, Informative)

    by spike666 ( 170947 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @09:37AM (#4696548) Journal
    the multiple user GUI Aqua interface rumor has been running around for a while. most recently Mac OS Rumors [macosrumors.com] has been reporting that it is something Apple is working on. MOSR recommends those who want to be able to use Aqua as if it were X-windows should contact Apple and make the request.

    but to answer your question, there is NO way to do what you want short of taking over the desktop machine's screen. (or buying a new faster *book...)

  • NextSTEP and Rhapsody NSHosting (Score:3, Informative)

    by petienne ( 414154 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @10:10AM (#4696808) Homepage
    Both NextSTEP and its later Apple incarnation, Rhapsody, included a feature very similar to Xwindows remote hosts: NSHosting.

    This was supported by the windowing system, then based on Display Postscript. If my memory serves me well, you could even display an application running on different OSs as long as you had OpenStep installed locally.

    Moving to Quartz, this wonderful feature unfortunately didn't make it...

    Some say some of the hooks are there for a third party to implement it (CGRemoteOperation.h).

  • The killer app for multiple user log-in (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dbrutus ( 71639 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @10:24AM (#4696926) Homepage
    I think that Aqua is such a high overhead system that under current hardware it isn't justified to spend scare Apple engineering hours implementing this functionality. Where it would make sense though would be in the next generation of hardware.

    The PPC 970 seems to be much more multi-processor friendly from what's been released so far. Creating a 8, 16, or 32 way house server in partnership with housing construction firms would make a compelling business proposition because you would have a relatively secure system with low virus potential and you could fold the $10k-$15k cost of such a system into that venerable institution, the home mortgage. Talk about a digital lifestyle, upscale developments created with such home servers as stock features would actually fit into Apple's business plan, be very profitable while expanding the Mac user base, and would provide a compelling need to be able to run multiple graphical user sessions.

    It's such a compelling solution that you might even get Steve Jobs to sign a clone license for such a beastie if Apple didn't want to pursue such a system itself.

  • Next version of OS X? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SlamMan ( 221834 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @10:52AM (#4697187)
    The rumor mills seem to think this'll be available in a future version of OS X.

    See macosrumors.com [macosrumors.com]
  • has any one bothered to see at the terminal if NXHost or man NXHost is even anywhere within the OS X underpinnings of WindowServer.app?

    I would but I don't have OS X to run.
    • Interesting.

      This is what turns up for me (note that most of these are duplicates, since the Frameworks folder has symlinks all over the place):

      [mithras@localhost: data] grep -r NXHost /System/Library/Frameworks/
      Binary file /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/AppKit matches
      Binary file /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Versio ns/C/AppKit matches
      Binary file /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Versio ns/C/AppKit_profile matches
      Binary file /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Versio ns/Current/AppKit matches
      Binary file /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Versio ns/Current/AppKit_profile matches
      /System/Library/Frameworks/Kernel.framework/ Headers/architecture/byte_order.h:NXHostByteOrder( void)
      /System/Library/Frameworks/Kernel.framework/ Versions/A/Headers/architecture/byte_order.h:NXHos tByteOrder(void)
      /System/Library/Frameworks/Kernel.framework/ Versions/Current/Headers/architecture/byte_order.h :NXHostByteOrder(void)
       So it seems bits and pieces of the old architecture are there, but are probably rotting away from disuse. I hope we can convince Apple to revive this effort.
  • A different tack may be Mac-On-Linux [maconlinux.org]

    It's designed to give you a remote virtual desktop for an instance of the OS. It is more like LTSP for Mac than it is like VNC.

    Of course, it is not simply another Mac app, and would involve wiping the machine and starting over, so it's not for the faint-of-heart...

  • yowza (Score:1, Troll)

    by scrytch ( 9198 )
    I nearly pissed myself when I read the title the first time as "Making Mac OS X Work Like Windows?".

    It's X. Or X11. X-Windows is something you might tell newbies, but it's not an official name, and slashdot really does know better. Ah but I forgot: slashdot's editors don't.
    • I nearly pissed myself when I read your post for the first time:

      "I nearly pissed myself when I read the title the first time as "Making Mac OS X Work Like Windows?""

      The title clearly says "Making Mac OS X work like X -windows." Check it again and I hope you do piss yourslef!
  • ... is X Windows?
    • It's a portable graphical architecture for unix-like systems. It's the graphical base layer for window managers like KDE and GNOME, it's also network transparent, so I can run Mozilla on the server and have the window for it show up on my machine. This is way oversimplified, but think of it this way: It's a program that makes *NIX capable of displaying the output of graphical programs locally or over an internet connection.
      • No, that's X or "The X Windowing System". I asked about x windows...
        • AFAIK 'X Windows' is the same thing as 'The X Windowing System'. I've never heard anyone refer to 'X Windows' and not mean what I explained. We're talking about the same thing here. Maybe people are calling 'X' 'X Windows' when they oughtta be saying 'The X Windowing System' but it's just out of convenience.
          • that's like calling an elephant a cat for convenience. it's just plain wrong. the convenient name is 'X', the proper name is 'The X Windowing System'. 'x windows' is a sure sign someone doesn't know what he's talking about.
            • I understand. You should state such things clearly in the first place instead of using sarcasm (which was lost on me). I thought you honestly had no idea what was meant by 'X Windows' and I was helping to clarify things. I was always taught that if can answer your own question, you should.

              (my apologies for sounding trite, I just woke up)

              • yeah, you're probably right. i was trying to be funny actually, but i think it's safe to say that that didn't work out. thanks for the effort anyway, at least you posted a followup. the only other feedback i got was a (-1) overrated moderation...

  • X-client for Mac OSX (Score:2, Informative)

    by tomem ( 542334 )
    Given Xfree86, wouldn't it make sense for the open source communtiy to offer an X11 client that could be run on a Mac under OSX? Then, presumably, anyone running Xfree86 could log into such a machine graphically, and run OroborOSX if they wanted to use an Aqua-like window manager. Does this already exist?

    Wouldn't Apple would be reinventing this if they were to develop their own graphical remote user interface?

    If so, this would not seem to be as useful as X11, which would allow logins from diverse X servers rather than Macs only.
    • Um.... *blink* *blink* You obviously don't use a Mac. XFree86 has already released an X client for OSX. It's called XDarwin or XonX. And actually, John Caramacks been a major contributor. (So I hear, he's got a bit of Mac love in him)
      • Counterintuitive as it may be, I'm assured that the X11 program that provides display of windows for programs running on another program is called the X server, while the other component running on a computer displaying its windows on some other computer is called the client. Makes some sense if you take a computer point of view instead of a user point of view. But it takes two programs to tango, and I haven't heard of an Xfree86 client.
        • Both XonX and XDarwin are complete X11 implementations; both include client and server. You can run your app on the Mac, display it on the Mac or display it elsewhere. Furthermore, you can run your app elswere and display it on the Mac. Using either of those systems. I'm too lazy to get a link for you right now, but I'm right.
  • One thing that needs to be kept in mind in all of this is that much more than the GUI is involved. In case you had not noticed, OS X changes the ownership of several files and directories to match whomever is the current console user. For example, the OS 9 Applications directory and the /Documents folder. THese changes are needed to support the classic environment. Thus, if you have two folks logged in via a GUI who should get ownership of these files/directories? One solution would be to limit classic to just the 'console' user, but that would probably mean changing large portions of Aqua/Quartz.
    In addition,Aqua would have to be changed to understand how to lock USB and FireWire resources so that remote and console users don't crash into each other.
    In my opinion, however, the biggest issue that would kill having an X-style remote GUI is philosophical: nearly all of the software vendors and general Mac users assume that the console user is the only user and having the ability to have multiple GUI logins would really confuse the heck out of them.
    • The only folks who could log into a particular Mac from another one using X11 or an Aqua server, would be those holding [distinct, unique] accounts on that particular Mac client. So they would get their own native preferences when they log in. There's no ambiguity here at all.

      This has all been worked out already for other Unix boxes that use X11 to get remote displays of their programs.
      • Ah, but the difference is that Unix boxes don't change the ownership of files outside of the user's $HOME when that user logs in. OSX does (all of the files/dirs that are set to 'unknown' group in / are set to be owned by that user when the user logs in). Again, this is to support the legacy OS9 environment. This is more than just the preferences since the question remains: who should own, say, the OS9 'System Folder'? The console GUI user? or the remote GUI user? or just root/admin?

  • Tricks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by theolein ( 316044 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @08:03PM (#4702771) Journal
    The OSX Window manager can be made to start without the finder by writing a shell script that , in one file, starts the window manger and then starts an application like the terminal. If you go into the console from the login window with ">console" and login as root, you can then start this shell script and will be blessed thereafter to be able to use MAC OSX without the rather slow finder.

    Why do I write this? This simply illustrates that Apple has done quite a lot in order to hide the window manager, and a lot of other functionality, in the normal view and it is very possible that there are indeed hidden hooks in the window manager to get it to work over a network, such as the ability to create a seperate window from another machine, not just pushing bitmaps around. The technology is certainly there, with Remote Objects in Cocoa. I also don't think it has that much to do with Quartz, as quartz is simply the drawing system and the window manager is the system that actually manages all created windows. Quartz simply composits and draws them. The fact that 10.1 had the hack of enabling one to enable window buffer compression lends some support to this theory. In theory one would simply have to know whether the window manager could send and receive window objects across the network, or if window objects were confined to the local machine.
    • Can you post this script?

      I tried something similar, but had problems exiting cleanly. For some reason, even SSHing in and killing the WindowServer wouldn't drop back from the 'blue screen' to the console. Killing the tty eventually worked, kicking back to the loginwindow.

      Also, I could only get this to work as root, but not as a normal user...

      Anyhow I'd love to see what your script is!
      • The script I used was: /System/Library/CoreServices/WindowServer& exec /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app/Contents/MacO S/Terminal

        It seems it can only work as the root user. Perhaps windowServer is picky on who starts it? I used to be able to quit the windowServer and terminal with a script to drop back into the console, but I think one of Apple's upgrades has stopped this. This is a real hack with the only benefit being that one can save oneself the resources needed by the finder. If one needs almost the whole machine for a single piece of software, such as Photoshop, this can help a bit in terms of resources. Apart from that, it is mainly interesting to see that the WindowServer could theoretically have hooks for other finders or functions, I think.
    • and will be blessed thereafter to be able to use MAC OSX without the rather slow finder

      Actually, I just did a ps ajx, and it looks like the Dock has been using about 7 times as much processor time as the Finder on my iBook.

  • It ain't free but it rocks like Gilbralter

    AND IT HAS Focus Follows Mouse!

    My life is complete
    Check it out here [codetek.com]

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