Re: No Terminal Opening
Re: No Terminal Opening
- Subject: Re: No Terminal Opening
- From: Bill Janssen <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:33:27 PDT
- Comments: In-reply-to Eric Hoch <email@hidden> message dated "Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:23:51 -0700."
> With Mac OS X 10.5 Apple uses the launch deamon to launch X11. This
> means that any app needing X11 now starts X11 on its own. It's no
> longer necessary to check if X11 is already launched or to launch
> X11 and the app afterwards.
That's true only as long as it's a C-based app linked with Apple's
version's of the Xlib (either dynamically or statically) running on
the local machine. Apps written in Common Lisp or Python (as I just
discovered) may not understand Apple's idiosyncratic use of the
DISPLAY environment variable, because they use Xlib equivalents
written in those languages which Apple hasn't patched to understand
their scheme.
To make things more complicated, the X11 spec in the latest docs from
x.org does not describe the "local" scheme that Apple uses by default,
and doesn't require an Xlib implementation to support it. The
standard X11 default connection scheme, "tcp", is disabled on Apple's
X11 by default, and what's more, even if you enable it, connecting to
the server won't work, because Apple's auto-launch of the server
doesn't work for TCP connections (yet). So antique invocations like
rsh solaris-machine '/usr/openwin/bin/cmdtool -display apple-machine:0 &'
won't start the server, either. So you've got to start it manually
before using it (in this fashion), but that's no worse than the way
that it used to work.
Incidentally, why doesn't Apple use the "local/" prefix on their
DISPLAY environment variable setting? That might make it clearer to
some other Xlib implementations, especially if they follow the spec.
Bill
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
X11-users mailing list (email@hidden)
This email sent to email@hidden