[KrUsTy!]

So it seems that Apple is getting into the X11 business. Granted it is just XFree86 4.2.1 tweaked and repackage by Apple, they have done quite a good job at the intergration. Not perfect but getting very close. I have just finished playing with it for a couple of hours, and colour KrUsTy! impressed!

http://www.apple.com/macosx/x11/

The install is just click and go. No config at all. Runs rootless, meaning somewhat intergrated with the rest of the OS X gui. Aqua is really the window manager, so things like minimizing to the dock work.

The applications menu of X11 is really a shortcut menu. So you can list all of your X11 Apps there and launch them from the menu.

Oh elmore, got X-chat working really quickly. Goto

http://www.opendarwin.org/projects/darwinports/en/x11.php

They have compiled some packages for installing. Just install the gtk and the the xchat package and away you go. The packages are OS X packages. Nice installers! xchat ends up in /usr/local/bin... So now you can use a good IRC client on OS X.

Really encouraging is the DarwinPorts project. Very much based on the freebsd ports, but apparently quite re-written for Darwin. I haven't tried it yet, but that is what tomorrow is for.

http://www.opendarwin.org/projects/darwinports/

Let you know how getting some of the darwinports on OS X works.

{K}

[bsdjunkie]

I cant wait to check this out. IS it basically like the XonX project? Or have they really made it a lot better now.... RIght now im looking at reformatting my OS X box since im still finding progs that want classic that could be useful, but I can not for the life of me find my Jaguar cd's . Its driving me nuts. :roll:

[KrUsTy!]

I'd say they have may real improvements over the XonX project. For one, you don't have to deal with windows managers. The Apple X11 has one that intergrates with the normal Mac OS X Aqua. So once its installed, lauch it and that's it. Its like it runs window managerless.

Also the Apple X11 is fully hardware accelerated. Not that I've tried anything with that yet, but they say that it wil enable X11 apps to use opengl, etc....

I would say (pure speculation follows) that they are working towards have X11 complete invisible to the user. Just launch an X11 binary and poof it opens and runs it a window, the user being unaware that it launched X11 in the background to run the program. They are pretty close to that now actually. Its sort of runs like Classic app for X11, only real difference is that you have to have X11 running to lauch an app using x11.

I got OpenOffice working late last night with very little trouble. They just released a new beta version of OpenOffice for Mac OS X yesterday (actually annouced today). You have to ignore all the "no xdarwin" warnings it puts up during the install, but it just works.

http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/

Hope you find your CDs!!

{K}

[Strog]

Have you used OroborOSX window manager (http://oroborosx.sourceforge.net/) with Xdarwin?

I've been using it for a while now and it looks and acts like Aqua. It's not perfect but it is way better than twm before I got a window manager setup. I primarily use it for admining some Linux boxes with remote X. I mainly do file/network/etc. stuff so the lack of hardware acceleration hasn't been too much of an issue yet.

I just downloaded Apple's X11 and it looks very promising. It acts a little different than Xdarwin. Just those little things that you notice from time to time. It might be a little confusing for some people to close a window with command-w when it looks like an app and should need a quit (command-q). This a consistency thing which hopefully will be picked up and fixed quickly. The more seamless they can make it, the better it will be. Looks great so far.

bsdjunkie,
I have a similar problem as you but slightly different. I have 10.1.5 all up and running nice with an install of Linux on my imac. My cdrom died and the replacement I had didn't have Apple firmware so it won't boot off it. I've had 10.2 CDs for a month and didn't get to install it on my machine yet. I grabbed a Quicksilver G4 out of the media arts lab and installed Jaguar on a spare hard drive at work. They don't need it for a couple weeks so I have a nice box to play with for a bit.