From: Paul Allen <paula@atc.boeing.com> Subject: Re: MGR and X Date: Wed, 3 Jun 1992 01:58:32 GMT
kdorff@nmsu.edu (Kevin C. Dorff) wrote:
|I know what X is and what it gives you, but if someone could quickly
|compare and contrast MGR and X for me, along with their speed, disk
|requirements, capabilites, memory requirements, etc, I would REALLY
|appreciate it.
If X is BSD, MGR is V7. If X is the Cadillac, MGR is the VW. Building
X takes hundreds of megabytes of disk, although you can get by with
much less if you're selective and practice some tape-swapping.
(And, if you don't mind not having sources, you can have a working
basic X setup in 10Mb or so.) Building MGR only needs about 10Mb or so
for the whole thing. X has resources, and zillions of applications,
and multiple toolkits, and industry-wide battles over GUI
look-and-feel. MGR has never heard of a "resource file", comes with only
a smattering of clients, has no toolkits, and is massively ignored by the
industry titans who worry about look-and-feel. X is complex. MGR is simple.
MGR provides multiple overlapping resizeable windows, each of which
can display both text and graphics. Text can be cut and pasted between
windows. An application running in a window can control the font used
to show text, select which events it wants to hear about, iconify itself,
etc. MGR has a simple mechanism for creating and using pop-up menus.
MGR uses the same client/server arrangement used by X, but MGR
can work over any reliable byte-stream without knowing anything about
the underlying protocol. I have an MGR client on my Sun at work that
gathers NFS statistics and produces a moving strip-chart. I can run
this client while logged in from home over a 2400 baud modem, and the
graphics work fine. I currently run MGR on my 4Mb 386 under Minix, and
have enough memory for half a dozen windows. (Minix doesn't have shared
text, shared libraries, or paging, so MGR may do a little better under
Linux.) I have a Trident-based SVGA card. Text scrolling is, well, slow.
It's possible that some work on the bitblt code will help this, but I
think the real fix is to buy a better card. The X folks all seem pretty
happy with their ET4000's.
|I would LOVE to run windows under Linux if possible, but since I am
|not networking or developing X apps (at least right now) MGR may be
|enjoy.
If you're not wedded to X, MGR might be a reasonable alternative.
It has all the basic stuff a window system must provide, but nothing
that's not absolutely essential. Experienced X programmers will probably
find it frustrating.
|ALSO what video cards they will run on will be VERY helpful.
I'm on shakey ground here, but I have a vague recollection that the
Minix port of MGR worked on any video card that could be made to look
like an EGA. It turns out that some VGA modes, including 800x600x16,
put the adapter in a state that looks just like a really big EGA.
Since a hardware vendor would have to go out of their way to make their
800x600x16 mode *not* look like an EGA, it's a good bet that *all*
SVGA's work essentially the same in this mode. The differences would
be in the specific values you need to stuff in the registers in order
to achieve the proper mode. One determines these values with a little
program that puts the adapter in the desired mode and then reads out
the register values. I use 800x600 for MGR under Minix, and that's
about as high as I want to go on my 14" screen.
I hope this helps!
Paul Allen
pallen@atc.boeing.com