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Apple's X11 Beta Updated 74

Posted by pudge from the enjoy dept.
Nick Rosencrans writes "Apple has updated its X11 software (still in beta) to version 0.2 and is freely available on Apple's site."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Apple's X11 Beta Updated More

Apple's X11 Beta Updated

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  • Still .2? (Score:5, Funny)

    by TellarHK ( 159748 ) <tellarhk@NOSPam.hotmail.com> on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:23PM (#5276288) Homepage Journal
    ... What in the world could the roadmap for it be if it's as functional as it is at .1 and .2?
    • LOL! Sorry, I used up my mod points earlier today...

    • Re:Still .2? (Score:5, Funny)

      by whee ( 36911 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:40PM (#5276377)
      Well, 0.5 is full implementation of the Reality Distortion Field, while 0.7 is implementation of OpenGL 2.0 acceleration. (0.6 is where they fix the RDF before Steve throws a camera and/or 12" PowerBook at somebody.)

      0.8 is scheduled to include complete integration of X11 applications with OS X, moving the X11 server running alongside Quartz, while 0.9 is more bug fixes.

      Around 1.0, X11 gets merged into Emacs, which then becomes the premiere operating system in 2004, slowly phasing out OS X as we know it today. In other words, they will have reinvented Windows.

    • I'm waiting for... (Score:5, Funny)

      by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @11:13PM (#5276570)
      I'm waiting for it to reach X12

      • Re:I'm waiting for... (Score:5, Funny)

        by iksowrak ( 208577 ) on Tuesday February 11, 2003 @12:06AM (#5276857)
        Poor Nigel would be upset to see it hit 12.

        "Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder."

      • My how times change... (Score:4, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 11, 2003 @05:33PM (#5283435)
        I remember that just a few months ago it was X10!

        All it did back then was pop up a bunch of ads.
        • Ooh I'll make a version number joke. Ooh 11+1=12. Ooh I'll use the Emacs as a punchline. Ooh I'll make a lame Spinal Tap reference (hard to do, admittedly, especially with that scene, but you did it, iksowrak). And so on and so on...

          I swear I never used to empathize with the "moderators on crack" reply, but the comment I'm replying to was by far funnier than any of the other "+5, Funny" comments in this thread.

  • How do I get KDE to work with this? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Green Light ( 32766 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:26PM (#5276302) Journal
    From the linked site:
    New in X11 v0.2:

    Support for Gnome, KDE hints
    etc.
    I was using the first edition of this, and could not get KDE to compile (using fink). Before I waste 5 more hours of my (precious) time, does anyone know if KDE will now compile with this new edition?

    • Re:How do I get KDE to work with this? (Score:5, Informative)

      by WatertonMan ( 550706 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:50PM (#5276424)
      KDE works great with this version. I'd suggest compiling 3.1 from cvs though. With this version I find KDE is actually faster than Aqua windows. Great. With X11.b1 I had lots of random crashes and the problem of windows/menus under the OSX menu. X11.b2 fixes all this. As an added bonus OSX fonts now show up in KDE applications. Very nice.

      The problem I'm left with is that clicking on a KDE window doesn't bring it to the front over an Aqua window for some reason. Oddly this doesn't affect non-KDE windows, such as Gnome apps like Gnumeric. I can't quite figure that out.

      My remaining problem is that I can't seem to copy and paste between X11 apps and OSX apps. I'm not sure why. A few people are left with some phantom processes, even after quitting X11. So that may be what is keeping copy and paste from working right. I'd started it using the kde window manager instead of the aqua-wm manager. So perhaps something was left running that was screwing aqua-wm up.

      Still overall it feels faster and from my preliminary testing is much more stable.

    • Re:How do I get KDE to work with this? (Score:4, Informative)

      by teridon ( 139550 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @11:15PM (#5276583) Homepage
      Is there some reason you must compile from source? How about just install the binary with "sudo apt-get install bundle-kde"?
      • With the older version of Fink compiling against the X11 sources improved things considerably. I'd expect that if you've updated Fink since X11.app came out this isn't necessary. In my case I made the mistake of upgrading Perl outside of Fink and that screwed many things up since Fink's expected version of Perl was different than mine. I ended up having to recompile most of my stuff from scratch. It wasn't too bad. I just let it run all night. (grin)
      • Yes, the problem is that they only have 3.0.7 as binary.
        If you want 3.1 you have to compile from source, and you really should get KDE 3.1!

  • Downloaded it earlier today... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:32PM (#5276330)
    -Installing and running was good..
    -connected to a RH box and ran gimp, netscape, magic and they worked great
    -I like the fact that my X windows minimize under the doc and don't run inside a super X window.
    - I wish there are more preferences and a more intutive way to add applications.

    Also, Apple should add more info to the getting started section with some 2-way examples.

  • Thank you Apple... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ActiveSX ( 301342 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:35PM (#5276348) Homepage
    The lack of focus follows cursor in the pretty Aqua-y WM is the one thing that really bummed me out about 0.1. Now if I could only get it for the rest of the operating system...
    • Check out the virtual desktop from codetek [codetek.com]
      It has focus follows mouse as wel as the ability to have a pager window (think fvwm from linux days). And no, I don't work there, I just happen to really like the product and have been very impressed with their support and bug fixes.

    • Re:Thank you Apple... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mbbac ( 568880 ) on Tuesday February 11, 2003 @09:49AM (#5278907)
      Focus follows pointer isn't a good idea when you have a global menu bar.
      • I hadn't even thought of that! Damn, there goes that idea. Well, perhaps focus follows cursor in the current application? That'd be okay too, I suppose.

      • Re:Thank you Apple... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by spitzak ( 4019 )
        Actually I think there is a solution to that.

        The first thing I thought of was to not have the menubar change for awhile so that moving the mouse up to it over other windows does not change it.

        But now I think a much better idea is to not change it until you type to a window. Thus you can move the mouse to point at and highlight windows all you want, but the menubar does not change and thus you can continue moving to it to pull down a menu. Typing any key (including pushing down the command key for a menu shortcut) will switch the menubar to match the current focuesed window.

        Clicking on the titlebar of a window would raise it, make it have the focus, and change the menubar.

        Clicking inside a window would probably act exactly like the titlebar, if I can predict how Apple would design it. However I would prefer the apps to not raise unless the click was in a "dead" area such as blank background or anything where clicking does nothing, but clicking on a button or text field does not raise the window. In this case if you click on a button it is not clear if this should change the menubar. Anything that raises the window, including the app doing it itself, should change the menubar.

        • Re:Thank you Apple... (Score:3, Informative)

          by Masker ( 25119 )
          Actually, there are greater problems than the global menu bar. The way we work around the global menu bar problem with Focus-Follows-Mouse in CodeTek VirtualDesktop is to do two things:

          1) Allow the user to say "don't change focus if the mouse is in motion"

          2) Have a configurable timer that has to elapse before focus takes place

          These are pretty standard for other FFM implementations, but are really necessary for the global menu bar. Therefore, if I have my FFM to "Not while in motion" and a delay of .1 second, it works pretty well; I can move over other windows to get to the menu bar, the Dock or Interface Builder palettes all without triggering unwanted switches.

          The bigger problem is that while we can focus other windows, we HAVE to raise the windows in the case of Carbon windows. We can non-raise focus Cocoa windows, but there are two problems:

          1) It's confusing because some windows (at least to users who don't know what applications use which technology) arbitrarily will raise or not raise.

          2) The rest of the system is strictly click-to-focus. This causes problems when you do things like select text from a window that has been focused, but not raised.

          Actually, the 2nd problem is the greater of the two. When I have two Terminal windows open that overlap, I like to be able to cut & paste between the two without changing their stacking. Unfortunately, you can't do that because when you click to select text, the mouse down event is the click-to-focus event.

          We're hoping that Apple can give us the flexibility to implement the kind of FFM that all UNIX/Linux users are used to, but right now the whole system has a different feel to it. Anyway, we do the best we can do under the circumstances.

          Oh, by the way, there are a couple of minor problems with compatibility between CodeTek VirtualDesktop and Apple's X11, but we're trying to work these out with Apple so that they can work together perfectly.

          • Re:Thank you Apple... (Score:3, Interesting)

            by spitzak ( 4019 )
            The timeout before the focus change was the solution I first thought of and seems like the obvious one. However after thinking about it awhile (but not really having any system to test it on) I think the idea of waiting for a keystroke to change the menubar may be much better. A system that does not rely on a timeout would be much cleaner and predictable.

            The other problem is something common to Linux and Windows, which is a confusion between being on top and having the focus. Unfortunately sometimes these are entangled quite badly at low levels in the system (X does not have this problem but new X window managers do). I can think of no other reason why Carbon has to be on top than the fact that the carbon interface to raise and give focus are the same and thus there is no way to tell the program otherwise. The double-buffered Quartz could easily emulate any graphic effects such as reading back from the screen so there is no technical reason why Carbon cannot act like Cocoa, it is certainly a limitation of the Carbon API.

            Your problem with terminals is exactly what I have been yelling about here for months: CLICK SHOULD NOT RAISE WINDOWS!!!! This has been an endless frustration as it makes overlapping windows useless. And every time I say it some moron will say "but if some raise and some don't it will be inconsistent and confuse the user". That is bull and paranoid thinking like that is going to keep alternative GUI's from ever being better than Windows.

      • However it is a good idea if you want to confuse the hell out of your customers.

        Is that window active or inactive? Huh? I have to move my mouse to type? Huh?

  • Tomorrow (Score:3, Funny)

    by Cokelee ( 585232 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:47PM (#5276408)

    SlashForward . . .

    Tomorrow .3 will be released.
    If it is, we can go ahead and call it a dupe.


  • It looks pretty spiffy, although the antialiasing is a bit rough... : ) Are the two X's supposed to refer to XonX?

  • fink and apple's x11 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by brarrr ( 99867 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:52PM (#5276430) Journal
    What do I need to know about having fink work with apple's x11. I have fink installed on my new ibook, but wanted to wait to see if i should install xfree86 or apple's x11 implementation.

    what settings do i set, where, and how. what are the differences between that and xfree86?
  • X11.dmg isn't mounting anywhere i can see. is anyone else having this problem?
    • It mounts fine here. If it has a weird name after downloading (something like nph-.hqx), rename it to X11.dmg and try again. If it is really called X11.dmg, try dragging it over Stuffit Expander to see whether it's maybe still encoded.

    • Re:well, that's weird. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Morth ( 322218 )
      Like some other recent Apple downloads, this one used Disc Copy to copy itself to the desktop and then auto-unmount.

  • Over on Fink's site [sf.net] they mention problems relating to some of the libraries that ship with the 0.1 version of Apple's X11 implementation. The download page [apple.com] only makes a non-specific reference to "bug fixes", and the Fink page doesn't say anything about the new release yet. Does anyone here know if the new release fixes the library issues?

    • Re:Library Issues Resolved? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 11, 2003 @11:09AM (#5279519)
      If you scroll down on the fink site to where they mention the problem with the libraries, they have an update up this morning that says 0.2 doesn't need the fix they've made, so I would assume that means Apple fixed the libraries.
  • dowloaded and installed this morning along with the sdk. when i cranked it up, i did not see the aqua like windows. instead i got 3 vanilla xterms. anyone else seeing this?

    • Re:window manager problems? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 11, 2003 @09:20AM (#5278758)
      This is in fact a bug fix, if you can believe that. You will need to create a ~/.xinitrc file that includes a line like this:

      exec quartz-wm &

      Alternately, you could edit xinitrc file found at /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc, but odds are that will be overwritten in the future. Also, Apple will put up a scare box asking you to ignore your new ~/.xinitrc, why I cannot fathom, but you'll want to dismiss it.
      • Ahh, I had posted the same question a few minutes ago and now I see this answer. This worked perfectly for me. Thanks for the tip.

        I didn't get the scare box you spoke of, but I got my aquafied windows and am therefore happy.

    • Re:window manager problems? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Halo1 ( 136547 ) on Tuesday February 11, 2003 @10:09AM (#5279042)
      Open up the installer again, do a custom install and install the config package.
  • on why apple chose twm as the default window manager? I upgraded last night and it took me awhile to figure out how to re-enable quartz-wm.

    One would assume apples own release of x11 would be targeted at those wanting to try out x11 without installing the traditional [read barbaric] way with the cli.

    Yes I know on apple's site it says the release is targeted at developers, but most developers who are creating apps for x11 are competent enough to handle installing the window system the "old" way.
    • Apple didn't choose twm as the default wm.

      This beta reads /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc and follows what it says to do. Readme says that installer backs up the directory if it exists. But apparently mine was left intact. Thus twm launching at start-up. I just moved /etc/X11 to /etc/_X11 and everything is cool.

      For those who haven't installed XDarwin before shouldn't have this problem.
  • The .xinit rc bug was annoying (I re-installed with a custom install and chose their configuration files before I worked it out) - particularly as this wasn't an issue in .1, but there is something else I can't work around...

    Is anyone else having touble getting the 'Applications' menu to work? I can't get GIMP to start except by starting it from an xterm and I'd really like to be able to use the menu for it (and other applications).

    I've tried using an absolute path, creating a symlink to it in /usr/X11R6/bin/, putting /usr/local/bin in my path (for that is where it resides) all to no avail.

    Is this happening to you? If anyone knows how to fix this I'd appreciate a hint.

    • Re:A bug - any ideas? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Graff ( 532189 ) on Tuesday February 11, 2003 @08:42PM (#5284493)
      Is anyone else having touble getting the 'Applications' menu to work? I can't get GIMP to start except by starting it from an xterm and I'd really like to be able to use the menu for it (and other applications).

      The hint you need can be found on this page at MacOS X Hints [macosxhints.com]. Here's the relevant text:
      If executing applications from Terminal instead of xterm you have to type "open-x11 program" instead of just the program name. If you are used to Fink and XDarwin this wasn't necessary. To get it back to the way things used to work, add "setenv DISPLAY :0.0" to your .tcshrc file.

      So either set up the menu to use the command "open-x11 gimp" (no quotes), or change your .tcshrc file and you can then just put "gimp" as the command (again, no quotes).
  • I have the Apple X11 installed, as well as fink. Way back when I had installed xdarwin and orboros. Everything seems to be working, yet my applications do not have aquafied windows. Is this normal behavior or possibly a misconfiguration?

    • Re:X11 question (Score:2, Informative)

      by cplater ( 155482 )
      You will need to do a search for xinitrc, and rename that file. IIRC it's located at /private/etx/X11/xinit/xinitrc -- I renamed it to bkup.xinitrc, and then quit and restarted X11.app -- everything worked just fine. If that doesn't work, make sure you don't have a .xinitrc in your home directory.
  • Yes, this is off-topic, but my story submission of the new Safari Beta was summarily rejected:
    Here are your recent submissions to Slashdot, and their status within the system:

    2003-02-12 20:42:59 New Safari Beta (version 60) is now out (articles,apple) (rejected)

    Whatever...in any case, you do want to go out and grab the new Beta [apple.com]. Fixes almost all of the bugs I reported (mostly CSS and DOM, also some random crashes), allows you to use self-signed certificates, and adds XML support (!).

  • X11 0.2.1 out (Score:3, Informative)

    by daveschroeder ( 516195 ) on Wednesday February 12, 2003 @07:19PM (#5291550)
    Well, it's already updated to 0.2.1 [apple.com].

    "Installer now defaults to replacing /etc/X11, to use quartz-wm instead of twm. This is the only change since v0.2."

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