Fresh Fish 4/FreshFish_May-June1994.bin/useful/reviews/software/graphics/gfxbasex11

Internet Message Format | 1992-05-31 | 8KB

From: Andre T. Yew <[e-mail]>
Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Jason L. Tibbitts III
Subject: REVIEW: GfxBase X11 X server
Keywords: application, x11, server, unix, commercial
Path: karazm.math.uh.edu!amiga-reviews
Distribution: world
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.applications
Reply-To: Andre T. Yew <[e-mail]>

X11R4 is a fast and usable X server that multitasks well,
is memory efficient, and sells for US$300.  It requires
either TCP/IP from Commodore, or DECnet from Syndesis, and
an Ethernet card for full functionality.  It runs on all
Amigas with at least 1 megabyte of memory and one floppy.
You should run it with 3 or 4 MB of memory and a hard disk.

Manufacturers' addresses:

    GfxBase, Inc.
    1881 Ellwell Drive
    Milpitas, CA 95035
    U.S.A.

    phone: [phone]
    fax: [phone]
    Usenet: boing!dale, uunet!cbmvax!amiga!boing!dale
    BIX: duck

    Harriet Maybeck Tolly
    Syndesis Corporation
    N9353 Benson Road
    Brooklyn, WI 53521
    U.S.A.

    phone: [phone]
    fax: [phone]
    Compuserve: [76004,1763]
    BIX: rtolly

    Commodore Business Machines
    1200 Wilson Drive
    West Chester, PA 19380
    U.S.A.

    phone: [phone]

    (Commodore's number will vary from country to country)

Full review:

    One of the main reasons I bought my Amiga 3000 was because
there was a somewhat affordable X server available for it.  I
can safely say that I wasn't disappointed by the quality of
the X server.  It is among the best Amiga applications I have
ever used -- it is free of any serious bugs, multitasks, and
doesn't require much memory.

    To use X, I had to buy the Commodore AS225 TCP/IP software
and the Commodore A2065 Ethernet card.  The AS225 lists for
$200, and the A2065 for $300, but discounts are generally
available.  In short, the A2065 is a good Ethernet card --
it's fast, easy to install because of Autoconfig, and easy
to configure for thin or thick Ethernet.  The AS225 software
is unfortunately a different story.  It is still a version 1.0
release and shows it -- there are many, many minor bugs, but
it generally works.  It comes with ftp, rlogin, telnet, NFS,
rcp, and rsh.  There is only a server for ftp, that is, you
cannot rlogin or telnet to, or NFS-mount your Amiga.  You also
cannot have interactive rsh, but you can rcp from your Amiga.
Installation was easy -- there's a script that copies the
two disks to your hard drive.  Configuration was difficult --
make sure you have a TCP/IP-savvy person around to help you
because a lot of what Commodore says in their documentation
is wrong or useless.  There are other TCP/IP clients and
daemons included, but they're mostly irrelevant to this
review.  The next release is suppose to also include Compressed
SLIP for running IP over serial lines, so you'll be able to
run X over serial lines.

    The X documentation consists of one mini three-ring binder
that has about 31 pages of Amiga-specific instructions.  It
told you what you how much memory and disk space you needed
to run X,  and how to install the full and the minimal X
configurations.  Also, a very helpful "Common problems"
section in the form of questions and answers was included.
This section alone will save a lot of hair pulling.  The
rest of the 31 pages summarizes the various options of the
X server and other random useful things.  The manual is
clear, concise, and generally well-written.

    The other hundred-odd pages of the manual are printed
UNIX manual pages mainly from the MIT X distribution.  The
Amiga X server is also described here under Xamiga.

    Installing X was pretty easy:  a script is included that
lharcs the compressed files on the eight disks onto your
hard drive.  Configuration was pretty easy too because you
just had to make an assign and add a path.  Two scripts come
with X to make running the X server easier.  You can just run
them and they will call Xamiga (the X server) with the
right arguments.  You will probably want to change them to
your own tastes after a while.

    Before I received my color R4 server, I ran the monochrome
server almost exclusively because the color R3 server was
very slow.  It takes about 2 to 3 seconds for the X server
to get going before you see the familiar gray stipple.  The
first thing you notice is the HUGE X cursor staring you in the
face.  For anyone who's used X before, imagine doubling your
cursor size and then dividing your viewing area by 4, so you
get a cursor that's about 4 times bigger than normal.  Fortunately,
here's where the many options of the X server come in handy.
First of all, you can interlace the cursor, so it looks normal.
You can also pretend you have a larger screen than you really
do and scroll around on a virtual screen of up to 1008 by 1024
pixels.  The scrolling is smooth and easy to deal with.  You
can also request an interlaced, a2024, a2025, Superhires, or
Productivity screen.  You can specify color swapping for
exchanging black and white, what colors black and white actually
are, what colors you want your cursor to be, how many colors
you want, and what networking protocol you want to use.

    When you actually use the X server -- and I use it to run
clients from Hewlett-Packards and Suns -- it's not unlike a real
workstation running X.  It's fast and responsive to the user.
>From the things I've run, there doesn't seem to be any
compatibility problems.  The X server opens its own custom
screen too, so you can drag the screen down with lots
of X windows on it and impress all your friends (:-).

    I just got the R4 color X server a week ago, so I haven't
had much of a chance to play with it.  But it is definitely more
usable than the R3 server.  The server supports up to 16 colors,
and runs pretty quickly in even 16-color mode.  You can get
up to 256 24-bit colors with GfxBase's GDA-1 video card or
Ameristar's 1600GX.  Because 16 colors wasn't anywhere near
useful to me, and I didn't want to live with the speed loss,
I generally use the X server in its monochrome mode.  I did
however, for fun, try some nasty color X programs and the server
handled them with no problems.  With some luck, perhaps I
can have a follow-up review of the color X server with the GDA-1
sometime near the end of summer.

    You don't have to run clients remotely because GfxBase gives
you a lot of your own clients.  Most of them are of the demo
and utility types (ico, xclock, xcalc, ...), but there are
also two window managers -- TWM and OLWM.  All of the ppm/pbm
utilities also come with X.  A developer's kit is also available
for compiling your own X programs.  There are some clients on
nic.funet.fi that were kindly ported by Bob Beauchemin, who has
the kit.  He says that they are easy to port.  The server and
clients are also impressive in that they respond to breaks and
control-C's very well.  They will always die gracefully when you
send them a break or control-C.

    So far, the only way I've managed to crash the X server is to
run out of memory.  It kills itself gracefully and returns all
memory when that happens.  System requesters that popup on the
X screen tend to be pretty ugly and leave footprints all over
your windows.  However, this can be fixed by a refresh.  The
top 10 or 20 pixels are unusable in X because the server uses
that as its screen handles.  All mouse button events that happen
up there seem to be trapped and not passed on to the X server,
so make sure your window handles are bigger than that or else
don't put anything up there.

    In summary, GfxBase's X11R4 server is fast, system-friendly,
and usable.  Anyone who needs an X server should take a serious
look at it.
---
Andre Yew                   [e-mail] (131.215.48.100)