Fedora moves the X server

Posted Oct 29, 2008 18:04 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Fedora moves the X server by petegn
Parent article: Fedora moves the X server

Text mode (a video adapter property) != command-line interface.

Personally I spend 99.99% of my time in X, mostly so that I get syntax
highlighting and huge numbers of rows and columns in my konsoles: I
imagine most people on non-horribly-constrained hardware do something
similar. I can't imagine why anyone would care what virtual console the X
server is running on...

Fedora moves the X server

Posted Oct 29, 2008 18:17 UTC (Wed) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link] (2 responses)

I tend to agree. Put the primary interface first. X has become the primary interface for the vast, vast majority of workstations. (I can't really speak for headless servers. I'm a "desktop Linux user.")

As long as I can get to a text console when X gets messed up, then I'm happy. Whether it's Ctrl-Alt-F1 or Ctrl-Alt-F2 doesn't really bother me.

What I don't quite understand is the "speed up" part. Is it that X has to search for an unused TTY and then tell the kernel to switch to it? Can't X just be told what TTY to go to, rather than having to discover it? Or at least patched to skip TTYs that will be dedicated to something other than X?

Fedora moves the X server

Posted Oct 29, 2008 20:06 UTC (Wed) by ianburrell (guest, #47313) [Link] (1 responses)

It takes some video cards and monitors a long time to switch modes when changing virtual terminals. Some of the people on the Fedora mailing list were talking about 3 seconds per switch.

Fedora moves the X server

Posted Oct 30, 2008 14:22 UTC (Thu) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link]

Here's where I'm confused: How is that a function of switching to VT7? If I start X on VT1 or VT7 or VT493, either way it needs to switch into graphics mode and the monitor needs to resync. That's the source of the 3 second delay, isn't it?

Fedora moves the X server

Posted Oct 29, 2008 19:16 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (1 responses)

Muscle memory is the only good reason I can think of. I cannot even remember explicitly what keys to press, but I know that... aha, I just thought "want text VT" and apparently it was Ctrl-Alt-F1.

Unnecessarily varying things that are in muscle memory is kind of annoying. I don't care enough about this example to make a song and dance, but I can imagine that for some people it seems like their toes are being trodden on.

And yes, a lot of people seem to have got dragged into this by not knowing that VGA text mode is some crazy IBM PS/2 invention, not a venerable Unix tradition, and so its inclusion in Linux is an artefact of Linus' shiny new VGA capable 386 back in 1991 and losing it from Fedora would be as significant as e.g. losing support for the 386 (which yes, already happened). I remember being surprised when I first saw a real Unix workstation (Solbourne I think) crash and scrawl poorly rendered tiny text over its framebuffer, but I got over it, I didn't go out and immediately buy myself a vt320. <insert rambling about Kids These Days...>

Fedora moves the X server

Posted Nov 5, 2008 20:50 UTC (Wed) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link]

And yes, a lot of people seem to have got dragged into this by not knowing that VGA text mode is some crazy IBM PS/2 invention

Text mode existed in the very first IBM PCs and in virtually all of the "PCs" that preceded them. It has nothing to do with either VGA or PS/2 beyond continuing to be supported in them (albeit with slightly higher-resolution fonts than most of their predecessors, save only monochrome EGA).

Greg