On Thu, 1 Feb 2001, Andy Geoghegan, Superstar wrote:
> I am a UNIX shell and SLIP account owner... when I browse the web using my
> shell account and my ISP's UNIX machines, I use lynx
>
> I have heard that X or X Window is like a GUI for UNIX... and I remember
> circa '90 - '96 at the now-defunct ivy high-tech/med book shop - TONS of
> greek computer texts on: X.24, X.23, X.500, X Tools, X Motif - What Were
> These??? What Were These books about??
X.25 is the protocol for radio modem. I'm not sure about the
other X.xx protocols.
Motif is a proprietary graphics API for Unix. It's also what
PC/GEOS used. Lesstif is its open-source counterpart.
> What Is X??
X is the abbreviation for "X windows system" which is the
low/medium-level graphics interface software. Motif
would be the layer directly on top of X, then the window manager
is the layer above that. Gnome & KDE are Desktop Environments
which are even higher level layers atop the window managers.
> can a random access shell/CLI+{SLIP} acct. user, "Install X?"??, remotely
> on his or her's ISP's UNIX machines??
No. You need root privelege to install X... that's even
assuming the server has a graphics card. Many don't.
HOWEVER, my last ISP had X installed, and even had some of the
config files as part of each user's default files. That's
quite the exception however. Do 'ls -al' to see what kind of
"dot" files you might have in your shell.
(If your ISP has X installed, you should be able to run the
vncserver from your user space though)
> would I want to, or even could I, run/install/configure Netscape or IE or
> even Arachne, remotely from my shell terminal to my ISP's UNIX rather than
> on my own (DOS)-WindowsX machine?? would it be faster? ? ?
I only downloaded VNC day before yesterday, so I can't say
authoritatively what it can or can't do. Not to mention that
there are other X server/client kind of programs besides VNC.
Running programs on the Linux box and viewing them from Win'95
over VNC hasn't been flawless... but this is "out of the box."
I haven't even looked at any config files yet.
CAN run: (*)Barely runs: (**)Doesn't run:
-------- ------------ ----------
Netscape 3.04 Arachne-GGI
xv xgalaga(+)
Amaya 4.2.1 gtv
ImageMagick
xjewel
tetris
pine
GIMP
taipei
xmms(+)
slrn
soundtracker(+)
gv (frontend for ghostview)
Netscape 4.76 (-)
(*) Barely runs
---------------
Arachne-GGI - I'm going to suppose that the extra GGI layer has
something to do with it. Type in a URL and sit there twiddling
your thumbs for 30 seconds for a text-only page from the same
machine it's on. I stopped waiting after 5 minutes for a page
with minimal graphics. During this time, Arachne was hogging 90%
of the CPU cycles. Ordinarily, Arachne might gobble up to 25% and
then die back to 0% as soon as the page is displayed.
xgalaga - This is a highly graphical action game. You get about
one frame every three seconds, so you're already dead before you
even see anything coming your way.
gtv - an mpeg player. Works fine if you want to step through
the frames at about 1.5 per second, but at full speed, you might
as well forget it.
(-) Netscape 4.76 - runs fine for user "steve," but complains
that it can't find a certain 100 dpi font when run by user "crow."
Strange.
(+) Obviously, since it's the host's soundcard that's in use, the
Windows machine won't output any sound from its speakers from those
apps. All the sound is coming from the host machine.
Doing this over a 10Mbit ethernet is mostly satisfactory.
Doing it over a modem would be purely for patience-building. ;-)
VNC does have more than just a single protocol though, so it
might be possible to optimize the protocol to whatever type
of application you're using.
- Steve
