2 Sep
2012
2 Sep
'12
5:31 p.m.
On 09/02/2012 11:00 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
X wasn't a "BSD world" thing either. It wasn't a "free
UNIX" thing at
all.
First and foremost, X is a protocol, not a piece of software. The
*reference implementation* of that protocol, and that's ALL it is, is
available for free, and it compiles and runs on many different
platforms, notably Sun and DEC workstations.
XFree86 came along to support more of the whiz-bang graphics hardware
in the PC world, all of which tended to be very inconsistent and fiddly
even back then. Who in their right mind changes friggin' sync rates in
order to switch in and out of graphics mode? PC video cards, that's
who. Madness. Anyway, XFree86 was put together to address all that
crap, primarily under Linux.
Eventually, most of the free UNIX implementations started to narrow
their focus to x86, even the still-very-cross-platform ones like NetBSD.
They switched most of their ports over to XFree86 some time ago, when
it became flexible enough to support other hardware, and that's where
most of the development was focused. This wasn't all that long ago.
You'll see these two implementations of the X protocol referred to as
"MIT X11" and "XFree". It's important to note that
"XFree" is no more
"free" than MIT's freely-available X server; that's just what they
chose
to name it.
X.org, nee
XFree86, never was a Linux thing, any more than GNU. Like the
GNU environment, it started as a cross-platform Free implementation of
commercial unix tools. As far as I know or can remember, neither X.org or
XFree86 ever existed as a Linux-only implementation.
I'll take your word. I am fairly ignorant of the BSD world - the only
BSD I've ever managed to install and get to boot up to a GUI was
PC-BSD, which is kinda cheating.
I was under the impression that for many years, in the XFree86 era,
the BSDs maintained their own X.11 servers, and Solaris still does,
the last time I looked - it offers the Sun X server for Sun graphics
hardware and X.org for non-Sun kit.
I have no experience with AIX on x86, only on RIOS/ROMP, but AFAIAA,
all the commercial Unices still maintain their own X servers, or did
until they died.
Was XFree86 /never/ just a Linux-on-x86 project? The various incarnations of the HURD are very minority
offerings
indeed and most of the other Unix-like kernels have their own
userland. You pretty much only get the GNU userland on Linux and you
pretty much only get Linux underneath the GNU userland.
Well not quite. Most commercial UNIX sysadmins, myself included, had
their first introduction to GNU software as improved replacements for
vendor-supplied utilities. This started happening LONG before there
were any viable (or even not-so-viable!) free UNIX implementations.
TO THIS DAY the first thing I do on a brand-new Solaris system is
replace a few Oracle-supplied utilities like "tar" with their GNU
replacements, to bring their functionality into this decade.
Most highly technical organizations (or organizations with competent
technical staffs) had their own "standard OS load" for a given platform,
that consisted of a commercial vendor-supplied UNIX (SunOS, Ultrix, etc)
with all the bad stuff fixed. Fixing stuff usually meant replacing
"tar", "awk", etc with stuff that had actually progressed since the
1970s...and it was almost always GNU. Further, you had source code, so
you could fix any bugs you ran into without having to deal with talking
to incompetent vendor employees and MAYBE getting a bug fix in a few months.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA