On Dec 3, 2007, at 01:01, Skip Evans wrote:
Ryan Schmidt wrote:
Well, ok, that might work too. Though Apple's X11 is really the easiest, the fastest and IMHO the best way to go. I got XFree86 loaded and I guess sort of working, but it seems pretty awkard. I apparently had to start XDarwin separately, which then opened three or four terminals right away, and then a code editor like Bluefish took forever to open, leaving all these terminals open...
...yuck.
Would Apple's X11 be better than this, as you say above? If it is faster than I'll go ahead and move XFfree86 aside and get X11 off my install disks.
With Apple's X11, you still have to open an app (X11.app in this case) before you can use X11 software. Or, from the normal (non-X) Terminal, you can type "open-x11 foo" to open X11.app and then open foo within it. That's on Tiger; Leopard may be different. I don't use Bluefish or really any other X software so I can't speak to its performance. I did notice, when using XFree86 and XDarwin once, all the unrequested xterms it opened, the weird window frames it used, the weird cursor it showed, the unfamiliar (to a Mac user) focus-follows- mouse behavior, and various other weirdisms which aren't present with Apple's X11. If you want to now switch to Apple's X11, you'll have to "sudo port - f uninstall XFree86", and once you install Apple's X11User.pkg (from Mac OS X DVD) and X11SDK.pkg (from Xcode disk image), you'll probably also have to rebuild all ports that linked against the X libraries ("sudo port -ncuf upgrade foo" where foo is one such port; repeat for all such ports). If you don't know which ports those are, just reinstall them as you start encountering error messages about mismatched library versions.