Return to the Press page

Vyatta – Linux & Open Source Alternative to Cisco – Advanced Routing, Firewall, VPN, QoS..
Free Download ->

LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 2, 2008

openSUSE and the distribution of proprietary software

Weekly edition	Kernel	Security	Distributions	Search
Archives	Calendar	Subscribe	Write for LWN	LWN.net FAQ

A Firm Foundation for the Linux Desktop (O'ReillyNet)

[Posted October 29, 2004 by ris]

O'ReillyNet looks at the origins of X and the accomplishments of X.org. "X.org has achieved a lot and is poised to achieve a lot more. It has issued two releases of X in the past six months, a feat involving a great deal of testing, management, and weighted decision making. This is an exciting time, where the foundation is still working out a lot of basic procedural issues, such as how to reach the point of making a release. Increased funding would make a huge difference at this critical historical moment in the adoption of desktop systems."

(Log in to post comments)

Posted Oct 29, 2004 19:23 UTC (Fri) by mjr (subscriber, #6979) [Link]

Hmh. While X is available for Mac OS X, it's a bit of an overstatement to claim that it is the foundation of its graphical display. (Would've probably been too standard a solution for them.)

Is this OT or what?

Posted Oct 31, 2004 22:20 UTC (Sun) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

The blurb didn't mention OSX, so I went RTFA and it didn't mention it,
too... so, I am undecided between you're trolling and you have no clue.
No offense intended, I am just curious.

Is this OT or what?

Posted Oct 31, 2004 22:30 UTC (Sun) by tomsi (subscriber, #2306) [Link]

The article begins with this sentence:

The X Window System, which is the foundation of graphical displays on Linux, Unix, BSD, and Mac OS X, has long stayed submerged in the public consciousness just as it has been submerged under window managers and heavyweight desktops.

I guess that this is what triggered the post.

A Firm Foundation for the Linux Desktop (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Nov 1, 2004 11:34 UTC (Mon) by dps (subscriber, #5725) [Link]

The article has the odd clueless comment... what caught my eye was "we do not use X, this is just a mail server" and suggested that X support might be useful. All mail servers I have anything to do with have neither X clients nor an X server (which is basically useless on a headless system).

IMHO X is inappropriate for any stripped down box, for example any serious mail server or box in a DMZ. I *do* use X but only on my non-headless development boxen (2 home+1 work). I have used remote X clients or cluster front end boxen via ssh, mixing local and remote clients on one desktop.