On 7/29/23 5:47 PM, Rick Troth wrote:
Xwindows is used by Linux because it had been developed widely and was
common on Unix when Linux came into popular view. Xwindows itself
is an excellent development. Sadly, Xwindows is way to "chatty" and
has other issues.
I'm curious to know what you're thinking if you'd be willing to elaborate.
(But the reactions against it from the security community are WAY
out of line, MUCH to aggressive. Xwindows is not and evil back door
for the hackers. But I digress.)
X11 is not good. I don't know how /bad/ it is.
I think the biggest thing is that most people don't think about it at
all. As such it has a way of biting many people.
X11 has a couple of authentication methods, per IP and MIT Magic Cookie.
Per IP is problematic when you have multiple users on either IP. MIT
Magic Cookie tends to help this and make t hings more per user. But I
don't think as many people use MIT Magic Cookie as should. Almost all
of the tutorials I've seen online still do things per IP or simply open
up X11 to the any IP that can connect to it.
Despite the authentication issue, X11 makes it too easy for a client
that can access the X11 display server to copy the screen to a file,
manipulate the clipboard, capture keys, read / mess with the mouse, and
various other surprising things.
You're right: z/OS already does Xwindows. Mac doesn't use Xwindows,
but its fore-runner NeXT did X just fine. (personal experience)
macOS doesn't use X11 /by/ /default/. But my understanding is that
there are many ways to add X11 on top of -- what I think is called -
Coco (?) -- thereby making it behave similar to Linux (et al.) and
Windows with an X11 display server.
MS Windows doesn't do X, but there are numerous utilities bridging
the gap. (Personally I go for CYGWIN/X when corp IT doesn't get in
the way. Works great!) I rarely use X based apps on MVS, but I've
used them occasionally for more than two decades. (Even used X from
CMS. Tell the ARS Technica guy *that*, will ya?)
I'm curious what X11 based applications you ran as clients on MVS / CMS.
The nice thing about Xwindows is that it's the same from one platform
to the next.
That's not as true as it used to be.
X11 used to be both BIGendian & littleENDIAN and supported byte swapping
on the fly. That functionality was disabled by default in a recent
change (within the last year) and now must be enabled with a command
line option on the X server.
Newer X11 servers should support older X11 clients. I'm not as sure
about the other way around. Especially when you get to older releases
or even X10.
Geek that I am, I started recompiling the compiler. (Gotta have the
latest compiler for everything else. Besides, Linux is "open source",
right?) Mike was more sporty. He brought up DOOM. We had to borrow a
nearby Sun workstation (I forget which model). There was no BITMAPPED
DISPLAY on the mainframe. But the beauty of this story is that DOOM
was essentially the first application to run on Linux/390 native
(outside of IBM).
LOL
Grant. . . .
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