Greetings, Some time ago I consulted this list about good X servers for Windows (it's easier and far cheaper to access Linux from Windows than the reverse; I need both). Back then, the conclusion was that there is no satisfactory free solution, so I've been using Starnet's X-Win32 [1].
Well, there's some progress on the free front. The Cygwin port of XFree86, which until recently worked only in single-window mode (which I consider unusable), now features a "rootless" mode where every X window appears in an independent Windows window. Rootless mode is not yet integrated into CVS, but you can grab the source or a working binary from the test builds page (I used Test68): http://xfree86.cygwin.com/devel/shadow/changelog.html Performance is quite good, though CPU usage is high. You still can't switch window focus between X apps using Alt-Tab or the Windows taskbar, but only using the mouse or X-based stuff (my favorite is having the Windows taskbar on bottom and KDE panel on top, both with auto-hide). Apparently in rootless mode XFree86 still uses its own pixel buffers rather than using the Win32 GDI, so you get all the fancy stuff such as the RENDER extension (read: antialising) and XKEYBOARD (read: keyboard language switching). All Hail Matsuzaki Kensuke! Regards, Eran Tromer [1] X-Win32 is closed source, and a single license costs from $140 for a standard license (1 year of upgrades) to $60 for a box-specific time-limited student license. It's reasonably stable (server reset needed about every 10 days of extensive use), and works very well though it doesn't support some fancy stuff like the RENDER extension. The alternative is Hummingbird Exceed, which is more expensive and somewhat annoying in myriad small ways. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
