From: Andre T. Yew 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 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: (408) 262-1469 fax: (408) 262-8276 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: (608) 455-1422 fax: (608) 455-1317 Compuserve: [76004,1763] BIX: rtolly Commodore Business Machines 1200 Wilson Drive West Chester, PA 19380 U.S.A. phone: (215) 431-9100 (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 andrey@tybalt.caltech.edu (131.215.48.100)