Re: [LUG] crappness help

[Simon Waters <Simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Brough, Tom" wrote:
>         "Windows was faster" - Alas Windows doesnt need to map network into
> the display equation. It has always frustrated me that you can just about
> run Windows 95 on a 486 / 8Mb Ram while Linux / X / Xapps on the same spec
> just dies :-(

X was designed with 16 MB desktop machines as the target
platform from the beginning, before Linux, before Windows 3.1,
and before many minicomputers had 16MB of RAM, before they had
even decided to call it X.

I don't understand why people would try and run it on anything
less.

>         Im sure X would run a lot faster if it went directly to the frame
> buffer

Then it wouldn't be X, as you'd never make the frame buffer
portable.

We use to render satellite and other detailed imagery on
relatively low powered X terms, although this could cause
resource problems. 

In the end we bumped up the X terminal minimum specification to
16MB as it was easier than having users click on "out of memory"
errors because they had too many images to play with.

These were purpose built X terminals, and a lot easier to look
after for the purpose than an old PC, however the cost would
probably frighten people by todays standards. We experimented
with running the Window manager on the X terminal, and didn't do
it in anger, so this is just an X server on a minimum machine
with a minimal OS that was small enough to tftp down on boot.

The old 10Mbps network was rarely a bottleneck with simple
graphics rendering, although big raster images use to hurt both
network and X term.

Would VNC shuffle more of the grunt work to the server? Or isn't
that what Steve is doing?

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