Re: startx fails
- From: "Brian K. White" <brian@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2007 19:11:55 -0500
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jean-Pierre Radley" <jpr@xxxxxxx>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sco.misc
To: <distro@xxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, December 25, 2007 4:32 PM
Subject: Re: startx fails
Brian K. White typed (on Sun, Dec 23, 2007 at 04:24:45PM -0500):
| I think the real question is, who cares that X doesn't work on a SCO
OSR5
| box?
| OSR5's X is terrible and I can't imagine too many people used it.
| I always disabled it on all my (customers) boxes.
Just what do you judge terrible about it, Brian?
I flatter myself that I have been pretty productive over the last
decade runnning a dozen scoterms plus a browser under X-Window on OSR
5.0.[0.2.4.5.6.7] and now 6.0.0.
--
JP
Sloooow (depends on video card support but can be ridiculous slow). Klunky
window manager. Old no-longer standard libraries and runtime api such that
some apps don't compile against it, and some apps can't even display to it.
x11r6 apps on linux/bsd boxen can't always display to a x11r5 x server, and
vice versa. I don't have lots of examples, since once I established the
pattern I stopped hitting my thumb with the hammer. By now I no longer
remember which specific apps had that problem and have no motivation to find
them again the hard way now so don't bother asking.
I've played a little with getting xfce running instead of the standard WM.
It's tolerable if you're lucky enough to have one of the few video cards
that are supported better than via vesa compatibility.
And since they ported xorg it gets better, but that's osr6, merely libs for
507, which only helps allow some apps to exist, no provide a x11r6 x server.
It's still never a very good desktop simply because of the lack of current
apps and difficulty building joe-random-gnu-app on osr5. I just took a fresh
look at the fully patched 507mp5 that I have on my new notebook. It works
and even supports the 1366x768 screen resolution, Pleasant surprise there.
But, since the underlying OS has no support for either the wired or wireless
nics, I can't easily test if the 10 year old looking mozilla can handle
current web sites with all the java, javascript, flash, etc. can it even
display a pdf ? Suppose it miraculously supported the wireless nic, where is
the wireless profile manager? right. Ok I'll just install wicd... right...
Twice a year someone asks me via email if I could look at compiling pdftk
for osr5. It looks really useful and I'd love to, but it simply needs stuff
that isn't available for osr5 (newer java for one) It goes on and on.
There's no end of things that won't work or are needlessly difficult to do
on osr5 and the discrepency between it and the typical linux/windows/mac
desktop gets wider every minute. Each little app or feature you can manage
to attain on osr5 is like a triumph. Satisfying to acheive, but stupid when
it all works out of the box everywhere else. Unless you're doing it purely
for the hobby & challenge, which presumably the OP was talking about a
production box not his personal hobby box that doesn't matter if it runs or
not.
It's nice that you use it. I used to too or else I wouldn't have any opinion
on the subject, but using an osr5 box and it's stock X server as a desktop
is by far the exception not the rule. It may be more to do with apps and the
usefulness of the underlying OS than strictly the x server itself, but that
that still means "who cares if X works on a osr5 box?"
Except for the almost unrelated aspect that, anything that changes at all,
especialy that stops working, would worry me, but not because I cared if X
worked, merely because I'd wonder what happened, what other stuff is broken?
was there some software incident? hardware failing? ungraceful
shutdown/corrupt fs? etc...
The typical osr5 box should be in a corner or closet with the monitor turned
off and no mouse even plugged in.
The admin doesn't need X to do his thing the day he's there, and the users
should not even be walking near it let alone using it, and I can tell you
about perfectly solid intel server boards that hang loading the kernel if
the box was installed with a mouse and then the unsecurable (no screws or
latches) ps/2 mouse cord is ajar some later day.
Imagine that? Can't boot because the stupid mouse is gone, broken, or merely
poorly connected? You want to be trying to diagnose and fix that problem
over the phone some day with the customer demanding the box come back alive
and failing to read all the kernel boot messages accurately enough to you ?
Remember, presumably you'd never seen this before so how long would it take
you to tell the customer to double check if the mouse is plugged in
securely? I'd have tried a lot of strange stuff and probably would never
have thought of that Who knows how much time that would have cost. All for
nothing.
Of course I tried to lock down irq assignments and set non-pnp-aware os in
the bios just for the record.
The necessary options either werent there or didn't help.
And thats what I think of running X on osr5 :)
--
Brian K. White brian@xxxxxxxxx http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR
+++++[>+++[>+++++>+++++++<<-]<-]>>+.>.+++++.+++++++.-.[>+<---]>++.
.
- References:
- startx fails
- From: willjay
- Re: startx fails
- From: Nico Kadel-Garcia
- Re: startx fails
- From: willjay
- Re: startx fails
- From: Brian K. White
- Re: startx fails
- From: Jean-Pierre Radley
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