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X windows to OS X

Edit X windows to OS X here.

FYI, there are now 2 commercial X servers. I have XTen from Tenon (www.tenon.com), which has some bugs that currently make it annoying to use. I just saw an announcement for eXodus 8.0 (can't recall the URL). I used to use eXodus for OS8, and it worked very well.

The good thing about both of these is that they support hardware accelerated 3D via OpenGL/GLX.

  • blair

Okay, I am bit novice here. I've seen people talking about having unix X apps onto OS X by compiling them. Could you guys put some commands (or actual examples) here. You don't have a try something new now, just copy paste terminal commands whenever you happen to get new unix X app working on OS X. Thank you very much.

  • Ravi

Compiling X applications for OS X is not that simple, since it does not directly support X Windows. To do X stuff, you will need the following:

XFree86 - X Windows libraries
XDarwin - Window Manager for OS X

Those are all available for free download. Once you install everything, then you can begin compiling X applications. I have successfully compiler and installed AfterStep, IceWm, LessTif, Nedit, Vim, and DDD. That was a while ago, though. I am reinstalling everything since I just got 10.1 and there have been some changes to the above packages for OS X. I'll let you know how it goes.

-JimG

I found a great site for pre-compiled OS X binaries of a lot of popular UNIX software. Most of these require X Windows to run. They are distributed as standard OS X package (.pkg) files.

  • JimG

Rootless X!!! - its real now!! - and very simple!!!

There seems to be some good effort from OSX community in this regard. www.osxgnu.org has a very friendly installation package for XDarwin+XFree86. It does everything with a double click, no making, no compiling etc.

There are several window managers for rootless, I found OroborOSX to be quite simple and very much mac-like. But, hey it probably is not the best one there. But, again, very easy to install.

With the above two steps, you should be up and running rootless X. Though, I haven't yet tried lot of X11 apps, theoritcally things should work very well. Good luck !!

  • Ravi