Re: [ProgSoc] alternative to X

[Jedd Rashbrooke <jedd@nospam.progsoc.uts.edu.au>]

 J. writes :
> I've heard something about an alternative to X, which doesn't muck around 
> with the whole 'work over a network' thing, and hence can be much less 
> resource intensive.
> 
> My Celeron 366 running X, is being thrashed by the Pentium 166 across the 
> room running Win95.
> 
> Any info / discussion about this X alternative would be good.

 An alternative to X?  There's Berlin / Fresco .. that's an alternative
 to X.  There's console .. that's also an alternative.

 But what's the actual slow-down?  X is big and wants lots of memory.
 When Win95 was released, the 2IC of MS was quoted as saying that it
 would run in 12Mb but to really get performance out of it you'd
 probably want to have 16Mb.  X doesn't compare, obviously.

 The network side of things only slows you down when you're doing
 remote X apps (an exercise for the reader : run xroach, xclock, 
 and xeyes across a 10mb network, and sniff the traffic), but that
 doesn't seem to be your problem (you've only got one X machine?).
 If it you had a network bottleneck, and a fast server available,
 then the solution would be to run the X Server on a fast machine,
 and screen-scrape it using VNC, perhaps.

 Perhaps you need an alternative to KDE .. <speculation based on
 X-Mail field>.  You're a few versions behind, by the looks of it,
 but KDE's still horribly resource hungry -- I find it runs quite
 fine on my Dual-Pentium3 with 1gig of RAM .. but woeful on anything
 less than a single-600Meatyhertz box.

 If you want a light-weight Window Manager, try blackbox.

 Jedd.

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