What is the practicallity of X11?

adambyte

adambyte

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This is being posted in the Geeky forum on purpose.

I am a Radio/TV/Film student in college. I sit here and enjoy my AppleWorks, AIM, iTunes, Peak, and Final Cut Pro.

Now... about X11... I installed it a while ago, used GIMP (found it too ugly) and.... dumped the whole X11 thing altogether. However, now that Apple is reaching beta 3 of it's own X11 thingy, and there have been rumors it will be in Panther... I have to ask... what's the practical application of X11 for the average Joe like me?

I'm just curious what you guys are doing with it, and what I might be able to do with it. Thanks.

Edit: yes, my software is legal.
 
for the average Joe it's probably useless unless you have another box running Linux or some *BSD or want to mess with apps that fink has. I simply use it to ssh forward X11 apps from my Linux box such as anjuta, evolution, and so on (you can run other things such as Maya and Kylix). It's quite useful if you use X11 often, I no longer need a monitor for my linux box. It comes in handy for using *nix apps localy and remotely.
 
I do software development on my TiBook. However, I'm almost always attached to a network consisting of several Unix boxes. With X11 I can do cross-platform software development across all the machines in the network, having them to open their windows on my TiBook's screen. This is the fantastic point with X11 - it is a network-transparent GUI.
 
I use X11 mainly for the GIMP (I love that program, always have), and GKrellM. I use it for other things now and then, but it's always launched. I always keep GKrellM up.

If ya never seen/heard of GKrellM, it's a status..um...thing. Heh. It shows your short host name, date, CPU usage, how many processes/users there are, network traffic, memory & swap usage, and the uptime. There's an option for disk usage and also a part that will tell you how much mail you have, but I don't have either of those set up.

It has a bunch of themes, so you can pick what it looks like, too. Homepage is here: GKrellM. I believe it's available via fink, but I dunno. I don't use fink. I compiled GKrellM myself (as I did X11 - I don't use Apple's - the GIMP, and the libraries the GIMP requires). I'm a die hard when it comes to that, I guess. :D

Here's a little screen shot of my GKrellM. I keep it down on the lower left, above the Dock.
 

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For the normal user really the only current X11 app for OS X that would be pretty useful is going to be Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org). They do not yet have a native Aqua port, so using the X11 port is the only option. Plus, there is gimp, it's not great, but if you can't afford photoshop and don't agree with steeling it, gimp works great.

Brian
 
hey
ive heard you can use X11 to run Wintel os's or wintel apps....is this true? how is this done? i used to use Connectix in OS9 to emulate 95&98, but ive sinced switched to osX and i dont wanna reboot everytime iwanna use it& as a broke student cant afford the new connectix suite for osX..... i have the operating system cd's (Windows 95&98) what do i need to download to run them, X11 presumably, what else?
 
I don't think you want to deal with that. You'll have to install wine and I've only heard of a few poeple that got it to work under OS X (yes it work even if it is not meant for PowerPC). If you have another computer (a PC) you can install Linux on it and run wine from it and have X11 show it on your mac which will be a lot easier then getting to work under OS X. It's a complex procedure you probably don't want to deal with either.
 
No you can't get wine to work on any PowerPC! It doesn't emulate the PC architecture, just uses it to run Windows software. Anybody that's said any different is just telling you stories.

You may be able to compile it on OS X (doubtful), but it would never actually work even if you did.
 
it is not possible, even short of rewriting the whole thing from scratch, to get wine running on a PowerPC platform.

period
 
btw...X11 is great for AbiWord and Gnumeric (word processor and spreadsheet). These are both components that are part of OpenOffice but run much faster independently than they do bundled together. They are great free alternatives to Word and Excel.
 
I regularly use rdesktop to redirect the screen output of a Windows Terminal Server to X11. But this is not running Wintel apps on X11 at all ;)
 
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