[GRLUG] Thinking of app servers

[Ben DeMott]

Nice explanation Michael on X by the way.

The amount of time it would take me to concisely re-enact a conversation I
had at Fosdem a year ago is just not worth it.

Several Large projects have attempted to replace the dependency on X for
cases where it's not needed, the abstraction is not needed or wanted.
And they have all failed... Mostly because of a lack of portability, or
backwards computability.
X isn't even sure about what portions of the user experience standard they
are implementing as well as loosely implementing some ISO standards.

X is a mess...
Not only from a "They don't know what they are supporting standpoint"
But from a general Rendering standpoint.

Basically lots of people in the industry want to bring a Good OpenGL based
rendering platform that is tightly integrated to *GTK and the KERNEL
For lot's of various reasons... argue with them if you want but right now an
Open Source equivalent of DirectX will never make it to *nix because of
rendering problems to overcome, specifically with X as the source of input
and output.
There are huge challenges with X's Frame Buffer and implementation as well
as support for legacy software rendering.

In the framebuffer source code there are entire portions commented out...
and at one point there were comments in the source like "What does this do"
I'm told that things have improved since then.

The original INTENT of X is not workable, or accessible to users today...
its hard to get running, and working.
If you are reading this you represent the top 10% of the most Technical *Nix
users (At least) so it may not seem that way to YOU.
And in general desktop sessions are not realistically portable.

The thing (being the collection of programs that form the end-user
experience) from a non-technical standpoint is a ... "MESS".
And the dependency on X is the fuel to the flame.

In my hurry to write my previous post I switched the verbage of X-Server and
X-Client, my apologies for the Typo.

And I commonly throw around the word "Gnome" to mean "The collection of
programs that connect to an X-Server and eventually get rendered to the
framebuffer", seeing as most people have no idea what the individual
components are.


Well I apologize this has turned into an X-bashing rant...

On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 4:33 PM, Adam Tauno Williams
<awilliam at whitemice.org>wrote:

> On Wed, 2010-03-03 at 15:11 -0500, Ben DeMott wrote:
> > X was designed, so applications could run on remote servers, and be
> > interacted with graphically on a local client.
> > The whole thing is a huge mess...
>
> I disagree.  I see a mess nowhere.  There are clear lines of delineation
> between components.
>
> > You should be able to attach and run programs on a remote X Server.
>
> That makes no sense.  There is no "remote X server".  The server is
> local;  that is the design of X.  The service provided by the server is
> display.
>
> > Have the X information piped to an X client and then have Gnome
> > attached to the local X client.
> > This doesn't however work in my limited experience.
> > This is the closest you can get:
> > http://mohanjith.net/blog/2008/01/using-gnome-remotely-via-ssh.html
>
> I'm not sure what his issue is (and the post is a year old).  But....
>
> awilliam at linux-yu4c:~> ssh -X adam at workhorse.cis.mormail.com
> Last login: Fri Oct  9 11:54:33 2009 from
> fdb5:60da:9b8a:1:219:d2ff:fe42:66b6
> Have a lot of fun...
> adam at workhorse:~> evolution
>
> Boom!  There is evolution.  I'm not sure what you are saying doesn't
> work.  Automatically started are:  dbus, gconfd,
> bonobo-activation-framework, evolution-data-server, gvfs-fuse-daemon,
> gnome-keyring-daemon, etc...
>
>
> adam at workhorse:~> ps -u adam
>  PID TTY          TIME CMD
> 11455 ?        00:00:00 sshd
> 11456 pts/2    00:00:00 bash
> 11499 pts/2    00:00:58 evolution.bin
> 11503 pts/2    00:00:00 dbus-launch
> 11504 ?        00:00:00 dbus-daemon
> 11506 ?        00:00:00 gconfd-2
> 11508 ?        00:00:00 gnome-keyring-d
> 11512 ?        00:00:00 bonobo-activati
> 11518 ?        00:00:00 evolution-data-
> 11540 ?        00:00:00 evolution-alarm
> 11601 ?        00:00:00 notification-da
> 11604 ?        00:00:00 gvfsd
> 11610 ?        00:00:00 gvfs-fuse-daemo
> 11623 pts/2    00:00:00 ps
>
>
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