Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!sdd.hp.com!decwrl!ucbvax!agate!stew.ssl.berkeley.edu!ericco From: ericco@stew.ssl.berkeley.edu Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st Subject: Re: Is there an X-Client for the ST? Message-ID: <1990Aug20.163330.17619@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 20 Aug 90 16:33:30 GMT References: Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator;;;;ZU44) Reply-To: ericco@stew.ssl.berkeley.edu () Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 33 In-Reply-To: <2904@male.EBay.Sun.COM> I noticed in your article that you don't think that an X server on the ST would work over a modem. Why not? Have you seen the X-terminals that are widely available? They use a Sun4 as the host, and they have optimized the transmission lines. If you look at the MIT distribution of X11, you'd see that it is based on a small set of primitives. These primitives are basically rasterops. Sunview is designed on the same set of primitives. However, it is designed to run on Un*x, so it can simple check that the device supports PIXRECT primitives. If so, you can run Sunview on it. I think that a very similiar approach could be used for X11. Create a version of X11 that runs on Suns using PIXRECT primitives. Then, one would have to write a transmission layer for the modem. I have several ideas on this. The simplest is to transmit the rasterop codes over the modem. A more complex (but faster?) method may be to use an aggressive screen update algorithm for rasterops, like what emacs does with text. Don't get me wrong, I don't think this would be fast, but I think it would work. The X-terminals certainly work. Eric -- Eric ericco@ssl.berkeley.edu Eric ericco@ssl.berkeley.edu