Hello...

I have read in red hat courseware that X is platform independent...That means that X can work on any Operating System...

But does X work on Windows? and if it does ..then how? ....Is there any tutorial on how to get this done?

Please suggest...

Regards,

amit

Here you go buddy

Linux is gr8 for sure !

http://www.cygwin.com/xfree/

Peace,
Whitehat

Thanx Whitehat.....thanx so much for the quick assistance...

Ya....I am at peace for the moment!....lol...( till I find out something else to ask about... )


Regards,

amit

Typically, what you will want to do on Windows is to interact with an application you have started on a Linux/Unix server. There are many options to achieve that goal.

One is obviously to use a commercial package that provides this type of capability.

I have personally used cygwin+xfree to display remote X apps. I had to compile xfree on cygwin, which wasn't really complicated. But it was somewhat ugly: I had to open my applications inside a basic X desktop, which was taking space and wasn't very nice to do. Since I first tried that, I saw that changes were made to xfree to have it run rootless. I didn't verify what it means exactly, but my understanding is it should be possible to use xfree on windows to display remote apps, without even opening a basic X root window. This is what commercial packages do.

Hi!....

Actually, I am happy to find out that X does work on Windows....However, the purpose of this post was a bit different...

See....The Red Hat courseware says that X is platform Independent..however, I think that Cygwin is a 3rd party application and not the Windows version of the original X-Server Application developed by the people at X consortium...

So, I'd like to rephrase my question like this.....Does the X-11 developed by X consortium come for the windows platform?

Secondly, I tried to install the Cygwin-X, but during installation it shows an error message "A Required file Cygintl-1.dll could not be found"
and the installation process freezes after I press OK 5-6 times...

Thats why most of the linux commands are not running on bash....I am yet to find out where this file is.....( i.e which package contains the file cygintl-1.dll )

I'd appreciate if I get help on this one....

Regards,

amit

There are several other X servers available for Windows. At school right now I've got one running, X-Server 5.01, made by Novell. XFree86 for Cygwin is free though, and it runs on Cygwin, which is like a Linux environment for Windows. So to answer your question, the answer is "yes" but it will usually cost you.

i dont believe the people that are maintaing X11R6 for *nix have made a windows version available but commercial companies have written native windows programs that speak the X protocol the first two that come to mind are exceed and X-Win32

Well ya, I do agree with u guys, that other vendors are in fact developing their own versions of X. Cygwin-X and the other win32 apps that kev is talking about are in fact third party softwares.

I am again and again emphasizing on this issue because I am enrolled into the RHCE training programme....and in the chapter discussing X-Window system, they say that X is O/S Independent..or platform independent....This can have 2 meanings -

1. Either the X Server which works on Linux can run on any other O/S like MS Windows, MAC OS etc ??

OR

2. The guys maintaining and developing the X Window System have a separate version for other platforms.??

I want to know if either of the above point is correct......I know that there are 3rd party apps providing the same or similar functionality as X, however, my interest is in knowing if the exact clone of X is available for Windows or not?

and if none of the above points are correct, that means, X is not portable as being claimed in the courseware books ( meaning, the same application does not run on multiple OSs)

I know I may be confusing some of you...but my question is very clear......I want to know if X is platform independent like we have JAVA....

Regards,

amit

Well... I know what you're saying... but look at it this way.

Mozilla Firebird is cross-platform, right? Yes -- it can be run on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, etc. etc. But can you use the exact same source code to build it on all platforms? Of course not. The Linux version uses GTK+, the Windows version uses the Windows API, and the Mac version uses Aqua.

See what I mean? Something can be cross-platform and open-source, but that doesn't mean the code doesn't have to be modified at all for each platform.

Actually, reading this, I have an off-topic question of sorts.
Is it possible to run say xfce4 or some desktop manager on Windows?

I run CyGNOME in Windows, it's pretty cool

cygnome.sourceforge.net

Poprocks, you have understood exactly what i am trying to convey.....However, just to extend what u have said...

Mozilla is available for Linux
and its also there for Windows
(The developers are the same...I mean to say mozilla.org)

Then we have X11 for Linux
But do the same guys ( X-Consortium), make X11 for Windows???

If not, how can they claim that X is platform Independent?? Of course any person can write his own application to achieve something similar to what X does on Linux....but that is not what I am asking about.....

My argument is that unless the original developers code an application to work on 2 different O/Ss.....we cant claim that application to be a cross-platform application....Basically, what I am trying to say is that if the X Consortium develops X11 for Windows, then we can say that X is platform independent....So Cygwin or any application developed by cygwin is not X....Its actually a 3rd party software....

What do u say abt this?

Regards,

amit

by coolamit
1. Either the X Server which works on Linux can run on any other O/S like MS Windows, MAC OS etc ??

OR

2. The guys maintaining and developing the X Window System have a separate version for other platforms.??

no, dont think of X as a big pile of sourcecode or a big program, think of it as an api and network protocol, it is in this sense it is multiplatform. think of it like openGL, which is multiplatform but if you use it on windows you'll be using the microsoft implementation, if you use an nvidia driver or ati driver your using their implementation.

hope that explains it.

Ok...kev...see i understand that....

Lets assume that we have a linux system. running X with GNOME.....so here X is the server and GNOME and Metacity WM are X Clients which use the X APIs to give the look and feel of a GUI....right?

So, how does the above setup relate in case of a Windows environment.....That means that we have a Cygwin X package which ports X to a Windows base....and uses the Win 32 API .......right?

I noticed all unix packages as .exe files....and therefore we can run commands on the bash shell....which is also an exe file......

So at the end I got the thing...let me put it once finally...

X Server is a collection of APIs and system calls.......Applications that are X-Clients use these APIs ( which are WIN32 APIs in case of Windows ) to display anything....So in that way X is OS Independent.....and Cygwin makes use of this capability of the X Server to produce Cygwin X......on Windows....

(However, I am yet to solve the issue of missing file cygintl-1.dll ..due to which most of the common linux commands...ls, mkdir, cat, man...etc arent working....any help on this is welcome....)

Regards,

amit

Hello coolamit78,

I think what they mean by platform independance is this :
- computer A and computer B have different hardware or different OS (ex linux and windows)
- you run an X application on computer A, on which there is of course an xserver running
- you display that application on computer B, which also has a xserver running
- therefore X is platform independant

Like Java, X11 is a layer over your OS.

Just like you need an xserver running on your systems, you need the java virtual machine to be installed on all systems on which you want a java app to run.

The virtual machine is responsible of translating the program bytecode into native calls and garantees consistency between platforms. The X11 protocol does about the same: it tells the client how to render the app according to the user input (mouse and keyboard).

So I think the platform independance concept is only achieved through the means of an intermediate layer between the app and the OS. It is the intermediate interface (here X11 or JVM) that garantees consistency between platforms. I think a "platform independant" app is different than a "native" app. A virtual machine runs an app natively, but a native app does not need a virtual machine.

I feel like I suddently understand what platfom independance means. I hope that makes sense for you also!