X11 Conservancy Project

Uhh, X11 applications work in a Wayland environment. It's no different than how X11 applications work on Quartz, DWM, or any other non-X11 environment.

So it's not like these things are going to break anytime soon...

krylon• 4 years ago

It's about conserving the source code of applications that used to be scattered across the pre-github Internet. I was a bit confused at first. ;-)

bitwize• 4 years ago

1) dwm is an X window manager.

2) X apps work on Wayland, Quartz, etc. because there are X servers foe those environments, Xwayland is currently the only maintained X server; it too will eventually go away (especially when the toolkit maintainers drop X support altogether).

netdoll• 4 years ago

DWM (all caps) is also the name of the Windows display server post-XP.

Conan_Kudo3• 4 years ago

I don't think anyone expects Xwayland or XQuartz to go away anytime soon. The only way that would happen is if someone pulled a Haiku and reimplemented xlib and other APIs on top of a Wayland-enabled toolkit.

asveikau• 4 years ago

Xwayland is currently the only maintained X server;

Just googling to check that claim. As a random example: xorg-server in Arch was last updated on 12/19/22. Six days ago.

Wayland proponents are so aggressive like this. You want to deny that anyone is still interested in X. Maybe it won't have dramatic changes. But people will be patching it for years.

tux3• 4 years ago

Because not everyone can afford and/or use latest and greatest hardware, Xserver and X software in general will never go away. Even when Wayland is mainstream. There will always be a need for older software. This is my prediction for the future. Just wait and see ^_^

yjftsjthsd-h• 4 years ago

Sometimes yes, sometimes no; how well does xeyes work under Wayland?

doubled112• 4 years ago

Works perfectly well inside the Xwayland session. Less so outside of the Xwayland session.

bmacho• 4 years ago

Terrible name IMO. AFAIU the description, it has not much to do with X11, and it only rises confusion.

thomasadam2• 4 years ago

Yeah. Nevermind though...

jmclnx• 4 years ago

Very nice, there are hundreds of little utilities in X that people have forgotten about. Glad people are trying to collect them.

ok123456• 4 years ago

They should add XOj.

lizknope4• 4 years ago

xoj was great

https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/#xoj

There are a bunch of great stuff on this link

waynecochran3• 4 years ago

I will use xv to the day I die. Great for remotely viewing / editing images (e.g. headless EC2 instances). Has features I can't even find in a modern image editor. http://www.trilon.com/xv/

Beltalowda• 4 years ago

It's kind of amazing how the last version from 1994 still compiles and runs with just a very tiny source code patch today.

It's unfortunate that modified copies "may not be distributed without prior consent of the author", killing any possibility of a "neoxv" fork.

hulitu2• 4 years ago

It's unfortunate that modified copies "may not be distributed without prior consent of the author", killing any possibility of a "neoxv" fork.

Well, just look at what happened to xsnow. I installed Slackware 15.0 and my config automatically starts xsnow. I wanted to see why it hasn't started, only to discover a configuration window under my xterm, without borders or titlebar.

My next reaction was: removepkg xsnow, fetch xsnow-1.42, xmkmf, make, make install.

lizknope4• 4 years ago

I still use xv to print maps and various screenshots. I take a screenshot then xv filename then right click, print, greyscale, Max, Ok

It changes the colors to greyscale for my non-color laser printer, scales it perfectly to fit the 8.5x11" paper, and prints.

I remember in 1997 during the first Mars Pathfinder rover mission that NASA was basically doing a live screen sharing session from someone's desktop and they used "xv" to load the image. I was 27 but I grew up obsessed with space exploration. Well I still love it, but at the bottom it said "UNREGISTERED COPY" and people on Usenet were talking about how NASA didn't register their copy. I think they did later but I was just so excited to see xv on national television.

waynecochran3• 4 years ago

Funny. I did register my copy. I sent the author some money and then, as directed, I changed the source code that says "UNREGISTERED COPY" to "REGISTERED." The folks at NASA might have not bothered editing the string.

tux3• 4 years ago

You can also try feh (https://feh.finalrewind.org/) feh is an X11 image viewer aimed mostly at console users. And sxiv (https://github.com/muennich/sxiv) Simple X Image Viewer (but this one was archived on github since Nov. 9th, 2022) and now replaced with nsxiv (https://github.com/nsxiv/nsxiv) Neo (or New or Not) Simple (or Small or Suckless) X Image Viewer.

waynecochran3• 4 years ago

I will try it out...

lizknope4• 4 years ago

There is some good stuff here.

I remember xantfarm, xfishtank, and xmelt / xflip very fondly.

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/ftp-archives/sunsi...

My university in the 1990's used MIT's Project Athena setup with AFS for file sharing, Zephyr instant messaging, etc.

There was a command named "attach" to mount a really long path like /afs/university/department/servers/students/servername/j/jsmith as /university/jsmith

There was also a command named "add" that would source the .environment file within this dir. This was used to set your PATH variable etc so if you wanted to use specific commercial software the .environment would attach the dir and set some variables.

People were explicitly told not to add a user dir as the .environment in that user's dir would get sourced.

So of course I made a script that kept track of what machine I was logged into. If someone added my account the script would run xhost + opening their machine to remote X11 connections and send me a zephyr message saying "I just xhosted you"

If they were in my actual computer lab I would run xmelt or flip their screen and they would freak out. Then I'd go over and laugh and remind them not to add my account.

kevin_thibedeau• 4 years ago

What's really on the brink of being lost are the commercial X environments that aren't preserved as open source. Things like the brown Motif theme on Ultrix workstations and early B&W OpenLook are effectively gone.

lizknope4• 4 years ago

Freshman year in 1993 and my school had a thousand DEC pmax Ultrix workstations. It migrated over mostly to Suns and HP's but I run OpenLook olvwm at my internship but I mainly ran vtwm which my school had compiled for everything. Ultrix / SunOS / Solaris / IRIX / AIX / HP-UX

Gordonjcp• 4 years ago

In the olden days, we all thought that bluey-greeney-grey "bobbly plastic effect" background was just the shit.

Mine was kind of bluey-purpley-grey.

MaxLeiter• 4 years ago

Similar-ish: “Cool, but obscure X11 tools”

https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/

tux3• 4 years ago

Thank you, I discovered few new tools with this website :)

unixhero• 4 years ago

Yeah terrible short name on this project.

X11 Conservancy Project

Related Stories