Re: Mac OS X 10.5: X11 Documentation/Release Notes
Re: Mac OS X 10.5: X11 Documentation/Release Notes
- Subject: Re: Mac OS X 10.5: X11 Documentation/Release Notes
- From: Ben Byer <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2007 20:04:10 -0800
On Nov 10, 2007, at 12:18 PM, Merton Campbell Crockett wrote:
I'm a wee slow in discovering the X11-users mailing list. Had I
discovered a couple of years earlier when configuring X11 for Mac OS
X 10.4, I might not be having as many problems with X11 for Mac OS X
10.5.
My primary question is where are Apple's X11 Documentation and
Release Notes for Mac OS X 10.5?
... not out yet. I'm working on getting Apple's X11 FAQ updated, but
it won't answer all of your questions.
To start off, have you seen these two links?
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=80171
http://www.x.org/wiki/XDarwin
I realize that the "'Chinese Orange'- and Gray- Walls" of
documentation published by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) are a
thing of the past. It would be nice if Apple could publish, at
least, documentation like the Release Notes, Administration Guide,
and Users Guide published by Berkeley Software Design (BSDi) and to
a lesser extent SuSE (SuSE/Novell).
I think Apple prefers the "Everything Just Works" way of doing
things. That ... tends to break down when they don't.
While not extensive as DEC's documentation, BSDi's documentation
gave one the basic, essential documentation about the software
included in the distribution. More importantly, it gave the user an
idea of the vendor's implementation approach and philosophy. In a
way, this was far more important than the specific application usage
details as it allowed one to customize and enhance the system in a
manner that would not require a complete rework with each release of
the operating system.
Fair enough. In that spirit, the two things you need to know for X11
on Leopard are:
1. Development of X11.app in OS X stagnated, or perhaps even ground to
a halt. There are a number of reasons for this -- some internal to
Apple, some external (for example, XFree86 is dead). To push forward,
Apple switched to the X.Org codebase for the Leopard release, which
was a very technically painful exercise and has left us with some bugs
and some unfinished features. In return, we gained a much newer
codebase (4 years newer, I believe!) and some architectural
improvement, which is
Under Mac OS X 10.4, I had X11.app in the Dock and configured to
start-up when I logged into the system. After upgrading to Mac OS X
10.5, this continues to work after a fashion but results in an xterm
being started with the default geometry and environment in addition
to the custom xterm that I had defined. In addition, there are,
now, additional X11 icons appearing in the Dock with several of them
being non-functional.
2. Launchd support. In brief, don't run X11.app from the Dock. Or,
at all, manually. Ensure that you are not explicitly setting $DISPLAY
in any configuration files, verify that 'echo $DISPLAY' in
Terminal.app reports something that starts with '/tmp/launchd', and
then just run 'xterm &' from Terminal. This will work with any X11
client application that links with the standard libX11.dylib.
--
Ben Byer
CoreOS / BSD Technology Group, XDarwin maintainer
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