[HN Gopher] Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple
___________________________________________________________________
Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 131 points
Date : 2024-07-11 13:48 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (matttproud.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (matttproud.com)
| cmiller1 wrote:
| Using a stipple pattern for the background goes back way further
| than X. IIRC the XEROX GUI had one.
| kragen wrote:
| sure, on a 1-bit display the only other options are solid black
| and solid white
| floren wrote:
| Well, you'd want _some_ pattern, because on a 1-bit display
| your only choices otherwise are pure white or pure black, both
| of which kind of suck. The Blit terminal also used a stippled
| pattern, I think the Perq did the same, etc.
|
| I think the interesting thing about the X background is that
| it's _not_ a simple stipple, it 's actually a pattern that
| looks very much like woven fabric.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It is actually a pretty unique pattern. It's not one of the
| standard patterns that you found, for example, in the
| original MacPaint:
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/aa/MacpaintWP.pn.
| ..
|
| And you could set desktop patterns but I can't find any list
| of what the defaults were:
|
| http://applepc.org/assets/system-6-pattern-2.png
|
| I think if you clicked there like arrow buttons it cycled
| through the defaults. I don't remember them having any
| pattern that wasn't in MacPaint, though.
| pcwalton wrote:
| I think they were all custom patterns specific to MacPaint
| and the Finder. The QuickDraw manual page 3-7 [1] says
| there are only five built-in patterns: "white", "black",
| "gray", "ltGray", and "dkGray".
|
| [1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentat
| ion/ma...
| crazygringo wrote:
| Tangential, but it's wild to me to see a vector PDF (as
| opposed to a scan) for a book from 1994!
|
| Adobe Acrobat came out in 1993 but it's not like 800-page
| books were being distributed for it by the following
| year, at least not that I remember. It's really cool that
| whatever program that manual was typeset in, someone
| eventually went back and managed to export the manuscript
| to PDF.
|
| Or, of course, maybe it was output in PostScript
| originally and they saved _that_ and so a later
| conversion to PDF was trivial.
| rjsw wrote:
| Plus the Macintosh and GEM between the XEROX GUIs and X.
| matttproud wrote:
| Author here: Thanks for the hint! Do you have an image or two
| you can cite for this? I'd love to see a representative example
| of this.
| cmiller1 wrote:
| You can see it in this picture:
| https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-
| star-...
| matttproud wrote:
| Thank you so much. This is beautiful example.
| technothrasher wrote:
| > In the old days, it used to be that mouse, keyboard, video
| card, monitor, fonts, plugin+module data, etc. needed to be
| spelled out in detail in /etc/X11/XF86Config.
|
| Man does it make me feel old that the /etc/X11/XF86Config days
| don't feel like the 'old days' to me. That stipple takes me back
| to using TWM on Sun3 workstations because OpenWindows was too
| slow.
| zelos wrote:
| My feelings too: XF86Config is the _new_ location, dammit.
| drewg123 wrote:
| Yes, it takes me back to configuring my X session for the first
| time on an NCD Xterminal in the computer lab at uni, connected
| to the schools's Sun and Dec servers. It was so much better
| than all the vt220 serial terminals, and they were "scary"
| enough that it was surprisingly easy to get one.
| kragen wrote:
| pretty funny to think that now people are scared of vt220
| emulators
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Even legit IT professionals are often scared of changing
| the windows registry these days :')
| kragen wrote:
| sure, but that's the opposite extreme, isn't it?
| bitwize wrote:
| Modern devs: X11 is bloated and obsolete
|
| Also modern devs: Show HN: My proposal for a modern terminal
| that supports 24bit color, inline graphics, and video
| kragen wrote:
| i was surprised recently to find that tightvncserver didn't
| display this stipple and cursor when started up without any
| x-windows clients; now i know why. to me they bring back memories
| not of configuring xfree86 (which was easy since i didn't get my
| own computer until 01996 and didn't equip it with a leading-edge
| graphics card) but of using x-terminals at the university
| starting in 01992. the xdm login screen had the default stipple
| and x cursor
|
| but i guess matt t proud is a youngster, or maybe had enough
| money to have his own linux-capable computer when xfree86 was
| hard to configure
|
| what's the best 1-bit-deep stipple pattern for this kind of
| thing? the zorzpad display (same as the playdate one) is 175 dpi
| and has a lovely deep black but no grays. the x-windows weave
| pattern cited here seems like a pretty nice option if you're
| constrained to 4x4: # # # . # . # #
| # # . # . # # #
|
| but i'm not
| matttproud wrote:
| I'm older than I'd like to be. I felt like a fossil writing the
| article.
| kragen wrote:
| well, the alternative to being old is being dead
| diydsp wrote:
| To really stress it out, I would use both 0 to 1 and 1 to 0
| transitions in the horizontal direction. Also, I would use a
| 2-on, 2-off pattern. e.g.
|
| # # # .
|
| # # . .
|
| # . . .
|
| # . # .
| kragen wrote:
| like this? http://canonical.org/~kragen/diydsp-stipple.png
|
| it's slightly more ornamental than pure black or white, or
| just vertical lines or something, but it doesn't really seem
| aesthetically preferable to the old x boot stipple
| pram wrote:
| Wow that Metro-X configurator is really nice. Messing with XFree
| on Slackware was a nightmare.
| lizknope wrote:
| I remember setting multiple modelines and cycling through them
| with ctrl + alt + plus/minus
|
| Then the monitor would freak out and start buzzing on the high
| resolution modeline that didn't quite work so you would switch
| away and go back to tweaking it.
|
| It took me a while to get my first monitor to run at 1280x1024
| @72Hz
|
| I later had some Mitsubishi 21" monitors and got them to run at
| 2048x1536 @75Hz
|
| My old desk still has a permanent bend to it from those two
| because they were so heavy.
| nxobject wrote:
| Commerical X servers were really something, especially those
| without an academic/FOSS heritage. Desqview/X [1] was one of
| those "DOS plus a UI and multitasking" OSes that competed with
| Windows 2/3.x and GEOS/PC, that windowed with... you guess it,
| the power of Motif and X. I think twm was the original window
| manager that came with it, and you could run emulated DOS
| instances and Windows sessions in X terminal emulators.
|
| [1] https://lunduke.substack.com/p/desqviewx-the-forgotten-
| mid-1...
| giantrobot wrote:
| A commercial X server was often worth the price of admission
| for a boxed copy of Rehat or SuSE. That and a copy of
| StarOffice. IIRC SuSE 6.x boxes came with a personal license
| for AcceleratedX and RedHat 5.x and 6.x came with MetroX
| licenses.
|
| They still had XF86 available but I believe defaulted to the
| proprietary servers. Seeing the XF86Setup screenshot evoked bad
| memories of inscrutable setup sessions that I was always
| worried would burn out my monitor.
| bitwize wrote:
| The stipple pattern always reminded me of the pattern on Sun
| workstation mousepads. For those of you who don't remember: Sun
| workstations had optical mice, but they're not like the
| Intellimouse-derived ones we enjoy today that can track on any
| suitably textured surface, even your pant leg. They had to go on
| a special mousepad with a clear, slick glass or plastic surface
| and a special dot pattern underneath that the optosensor would
| use to reckon movement. I think even getting the upper surface
| dirty or fingerprinted could negatively mess with the tracking
| (like smudging a CD could affect playback).
| drfuchs wrote:
| The Mouse Systems mouse used on Sun workstations had two LEDs
| (and matching sensors) of two different colors, and the solid
| mouse pad had vertical bars of one color ink, and horizontal of
| the other. You can take it from there.
|
| Inventor / founder Steve Kirsch used some of the proceeds to
| fund Frame Technology, which then went on to be sold to Adobe.
| And then Infoseek (a search-engine also-ran), sold to Disney;
| and then Abaca (anti-spam), sold to Proofpoint.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| That stipple background with the X cursor triggered many positive
| emotions. Like getting a remote X display to work. Another
| memory: Hummingbird X Server "eXceed" on Windows (NT I guess).
| steve1977 wrote:
| I remember eXceed being used in a bank I was working with. NT
| was used for the office stuff and the "big boy" trading
| applications were still mostly running on UNIX (mainly
| Solaris). With Windows 2000 a bit later, quite a few
| applications got ported to Windows IIRC.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I remember using a 486 Linux box and eXceed to allow people
| to use Netscape over the LAN with X because it was a better
| experience that way than using any other method of using
| Netscape on our OS/2 Warp desktop machines at the shop.
|
| (That little Linux box was the star of many shows. It also
| delivered our mail, routed our WAN, was our primary place to
| run IRC clients and news readers, and it served files.)
| kfogel wrote:
| That part about "...you wouldn't want to wing it with the
| configuration, because allegedly you could break your monitor
| with a bad Monitor setting" -- strike the "allegedly"! Or at
| least, let me allege it from personal experience: I did that to
| one monitor, in the early 1990s. You could smell the fried
| electronics from across the room.
| meatmanek wrote:
| I was briefly pleased with the ability to run an 8" monitor
| that looked like the kind on 90s cash registers at the
| impressively high resolution of 1024x768. Then after about 10
| seconds it blinked out, smelled like burning electronics, and
| never worked again.
| immibis wrote:
| For the interested: CRT monitors have a high-voltage power
| supply which uses an oscillator. Cheap(er) monitors allegedly
| reused the horizontal sync frequency for the power supply
| oscillation, to save an oscillator, so if the horizontal sync
| frequency was very different from expected, or worse,
| completely stopped, it could burn out the HV power supply.
|
| Has anyone tested this hypothesis? It could also be that the
| horizontal sync itself burns out, although that seems less
| likely.
|
| (In even more detail: Like any other switching power supply,
| the HV supply in a CRT runs on a two-phase cycle: first, a
| coil, which creates electrical inertia, is connected to the
| power source, allowing current to build up. Then the current is
| suddenly shut off, and the force of the coil attempting to keep
| it flowing creates a very high voltage, which is harvested. If
| the circuit gets stuck in phase one, the current never stops
| increasing, until it's limited by the circuit's resistance,
| much higher than it's supposed to be. The excessively high
| current overheats and burns out the switching component. Anyone
| working on switching power supplies will have encountered this
| failure mode many times.)
| disqard wrote:
| Your (parenthesized) explanation of switching power supplies
| made a lot of "secondhand knowledge" click in my head --
| like, for instance, why there's lots of high-frequency noise
| in the DC output. Thank you!
| satori99 wrote:
| Neal Stephenson's _Cryptonomicon_ made reference to a hacker
| dubbed The Digi-Bomber, as he could make his victims CRT
| monitors implode in front of them by remotely forcing a
| dangerously bad configuration.
| hawski wrote:
| That reminds me of using a CRT monitor to broadcast audio
| through radio waves: http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/
| throwaway_2494 wrote:
| I fondly remember programming my own higher resolution graphics
| modes via X86Config.
|
| I used to scrounge around at work to find the highest bandwidth
| monitors, and then I'd program my own modes with oddball non-VESA
| resolutions beyond the 1024x768 'standard' of the day.
|
| All this could be figured out by reading the specifications
| section of the monitors operating manual.
|
| IIRC I used an 90s version of this document to figure it out:
| X.org/XFree86 Video Timings HOWTO
| (https://tldp.org/HOWTO/XFree86-Video-Timings-HOWTO/index.htm...)
| derefr wrote:
| > For a long time the X Window System had a reputation for being
| difficult to configure. In retrospect, I'm not 100% sure why it
| earned this reputation, because the configuration file format,
| which is plain text, has remained essentially the same since I
| started using Linux in the mid-1990s.
|
| It's because X's config files were asking you questions that
| there was no good way of knowing the answers to other than trial-
| and-error. (After all, if there was some OS API already available
| at the time to fetch an objectively-correct answer, the X server
| would just use that API, and not ask you the question!)
|
| An example of what I personally remember:
|
| I had a PS2 mouse with three mouse-buttons and a two-axis scroll
| wheel ("scroll nub.") How do I make this mouse work under X?
| Well, X has to be told what each signal the mouse can send
| corresponds to. And there's no way to "just check what happens",
| because any mouse calibration program is relying _on_ the X
| server to talk directly to the mouse driver -- there wasn 't yet
| any raw input-events API separate from X -- so in the default X
| configuration that assumes a two-button mouse, none of the other
| buttons on the mouse get mapped to an X input event, so the mouse
| calibration program won't report _anything_ when you try the
| other parts of the mose.
|
| So instead, you have to make a random guess; start X; see if the
| mouse works; figure out _by the particular way it 's wrong_ what
| you should be telling X instead; quit X; edit the config file;
| restart X; ...etc.
|
| (And now imagine this same workflow, but instead of something
| "forgiving" like your mouse not working, it's your display; and
| if you set a resolution + bit-depth + refresh rate that add up to
| more VRAM than you have, X just locks up the computer so hard
| that you can't switch back to a text console and have to reboot
| the whole machine.)
| throwaway_2494 wrote:
| >It's because X's config files were asking you questions that
| there was no good way of knowing the answers to other than
| trial-and-error.
|
| You didn't have to guess, you just had to read the specs in the
| manual that came with your equipment.
| xenophonf wrote:
| Those specs weren't readily available to non-experts, never
| mind what to do with them.
|
| For a trip down memory lane, read through the XFree86 Video
| Timings HOWTO (https://tldp.org/HOWTO/XFree86-Video-Timings-
| HOWTO/index.htm...). Getting stuff to work in the Good Old
| Days was _not_ easy.
| anthk wrote:
| 30-70h, 50-160v =)
|
| I still remember that.
|
| And xf86cfg, and how much Debian was improved when Sarge
| arrived.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| The manual that came with your laptop of 25 years ago isn't
| going to tell you whether your touchpad is Alps or Synaptic,
| or which PS/2 protocol it imitates.
| neilv wrote:
| True. Though laptops were in some ways easier than
| desktops, since laptops tended to have the same set of
| hardware in each unit, so hopefully you only had to find an
| `XF86Config` or `xorg.conf` that someone had shared for
| that model.
|
| Examples:
|
| http://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/XF86Config-
| tp...
|
| https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-x20/xorg.conf
| giantrobot wrote:
| > You didn't have to guess, you just had to read the specs in
| the manual that _didn 't_ come with your equipment.
|
| Hey you missed a word so I added it in for you. Most consumer
| PC equipment definitely did not come with any documentation
| covering the sort of stuff X's config file was asking about.
|
| When that documentation _was_ available it was something you
| could only get by contacting the manufacturer about. But you
| couldn 't mention the word "Linux" because the CS rep would
| give a blanket "we don't support Linux" and you'd get
| nothing.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Sure it did. There was a page in the pamphlet that came
| with my viewsonic 15" that listed the supported timings.
| You just threw it away, but that's not X's fault.
| jagger27 wrote:
| > Just RTFM
|
| Ahh Linux people. Some things will never change.
| blueflow wrote:
| To the people down-voting you: X is from a time when devices
| actually came with manuals. When the people using it were
| engineers and scientists and reading a datasheet or a manual
| was a normal thing to them.
|
| I think this started around the 90ies that devices turned
| into magic black box consumables that are expected to "just
| work" while being undiagnosable when they don't.
| II2II wrote:
| > To the people down-voting you: X is from a time when
| devices actually came with manuals.
|
| To a degree. At least from my experience, something like a
| monitor and video card manual would provide you with enough
| information to filter through a list of example modelines
| to figure out which ones may work. Yet they did not provide
| enough information to create your own modelines.
|
| > devices turned into magic black box consumables that are
| expected to "just work" while being undiagnosable when they
| don't.
|
| "Just work" and being diagnosable are not mutually
| exclusive concepts. For the most part, the Linux ecosystem
| reflected that and still reflects that. I suspect the shift
| in behavior actually came from end users. They were less
| willing to look through the diagnostic messages and far
| less willing to jump through hurdles for things that they
| thought should just work.
| derefr wrote:
| > I think this started around the 90ies that devices turned
| into magic black box consumables that are expected to "just
| work" while being undiagnosable when they don't.
|
| I would say that it's more that the architectures where a
| manual _created by the integrator_ could tell you anything
| useful, became irrelevant /obviated by architectures where
| it wouldn't.
|
| Including a manual with a printed wiring block diagram of
| the hardware, made sense in the 1970s, when you (or the
| repair guy you called) needed something to guide your
| multimeter-probe-points for repair of a board consisting of
| a bunch of analogue parts.
|
| And such a manual _still_ made sense in the 1980s, now for
| guiding your oscilloscope signal-probing of jellybean
| digital-logic parts ( "three NOT gates in a DIP package"
| kind of things) to figure out which ones have blown their
| magic smoke.
|
| But once you get to the 90s, you get complex ICs that merge
| (integrate!) 90% of the stuff that was previously sitting
| out as separate components on the board; and what's
| remaining on the board at that point, besides those few
| ICs, just becomes about _supporting_ those complex ICs.
|
| At that point, all of the breakage modes that matter, start
| to happen _inside_ the ICs. And if it 's the ICs that are
| broken, then you none of the information from a wiring
| block diagram is going to be helpful; no problem you
| encounter is likely to be solved by probing _across_ the
| board. Rather, you 'll only ever be probing the pins _of an
| individual IC_.
|
| Which means that what _really_ helps, in the 90s and still
| today, are pin-out diagrams _for each individual IC_.
|
| Providing that information isn't really the responsibility
| of the board manufacturer, though; they didn't make the ICs
| they're using. Rather, it's the responsibility of the IC
| company -- who you don't have any direct relationship with,
| and therefore who don't have cause to be sending you you
| data-sheets.
|
| Thankfully, these IC companies do _sell_ these parts; and
| so they mostly have their IC data-sheets online. (No idea
| how you would have figured any of this out in the 90s,
| though. Maybe the 90s equivalent of Digikey kept phonebook-
| thick binders containing all the datasheets they receive
| along with the parts they order, and maybe repair people
| could order [photo]copies of that binder from them?)
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Modelines required timing information that was rarely
| available. You made a best guess and tweaked the numbers
| until it worked.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Or you hunted around in the pre-WWW world for a modeline
| database, and hoped your monitor was included.
|
| Here's a more modern incarnation and more background (the
| non-stippled kind):
|
| https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Modeline_Database
|
| https://tldp.org/HOWTO/XFree86-Video-Timings-HOWTO/
|
| https://nyanpasu64.gitlab.io/blog/crt-modeline-cvt-
| interlaci...
|
| https://xtiming.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/xtiming.pl
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| Yup, things are so much better now that they just work. Except
| when they don't, because now it's harder to do anything about
| it.
|
| I've lost count of the number of Linux machines I've seen that
| won't offer the correct resolution for a particular monitor
| (typically locked to 1024x768 on a widescreen monitor).
|
| I don't know whether the problem's with Linux, Xorg, crappy
| BIOSes or crappy monitors - but even now I occasionally resort
| to an xorg.conf file to solve such issues.
| jandrese wrote:
| Do you work with a lot of KVMs? Directly plugged monitors
| usually just work thanks to EDID info, but cheap KVMs
| frequently block that signal and cause problems. It's rare
| for a monitor plugged directly into the computer to have
| problems these days, even on Linux.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| No KVMs involved - but three of the machines I have in mind
| (not identical, but all running the same version of Linux
| Mint) have two monitors attached, one of which is OK and
| the other isn't. (Not mine - so I haven't put any time into
| trying to solve it yet.)
|
| Another machine - which is mine - used to have a 19" VGA
| monitor attached which worked happily at 1280x1024 for
| months, then one day something got updated and it wouldn't
| do anything beyond 1024x768 after that until I resorted to
| an xorg.conf file.
| jandrese wrote:
| Also, on modern machines you almost never want to be
| editing the xorg.conf. xrandr took over the
| responsibility of doing resolution stuff.
|
| To fix the resolution on a modern distro the sequence is
| something like this (use your actual monitor dimensions
| and refresh rate of course): % cvt 1920
| 1080 60
|
| Copy everything past "Modeline" into a cut buffer.
| % xrandr --newmode <paste the line from above>
|
| Keep a note of the first line in the field, it will look
| something like "1920x1080_60", this is the "mode name"
|
| Next, find out what your monitor is named:
| % xrandr | grep ' connected '
|
| It will be HDMI-1 or VGA-1 or something like that, this
| is your "interface name".
|
| Now add the mode to your monitor specification:
| % sudo xrandr --addmode <interface name> <mode name>
|
| Finally, switch to the new mode: %
| xrandr --output <interface name> --mode <mode name>
|
| This is the modern way of doing it. Manually setting up
| modelines in the xorg config file is oldschool.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| That's very good info.
|
| > For a long time the X Window System had a reputation
| for being difficult to configure.
|
| But apparently some things never actually change. :)
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| > on modern machines you almost never want to be editing
| the xorg.conf.
|
| No one ever _wanted_ to be editing xorg.conf! (xkcd 963
| anyone?)
|
| I did try the "modern" way when I hit this problem (which
| would have been in early 2022) - but even if it had
| worked (which it didn't) I don't think it would have
| persisted beyond a reboot?
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| I did break a beautiful compaq 21" CRT by setting an
| unconventional modeline to play gradius in mame in its original
| resolution. It was glorious. But it dropped a big brown screen
| from time to time. Until I understood why/when it turned brown.
| But it was too late.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Wait CRTs can be bricked?
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| A modeline is not like reprogramming a firmware or anything,
| it's just settings on how to move the electron beam. I don't
| know what I did, but it probably moved too far or something,
| It wouldn't show anything else but brown
| linksnapzz wrote:
| Yes; trying to drive a refresh rate higher than what's rated
| can do it-I think it had something to do with the flyback
| transformer? Some (later) crts had guards against this, and
| ddc more ore less prevented it.
| drivers99 wrote:
| I was thinking too low of a frequency. Probably high or low
| can cause problems. I searched and found this: https://retr
| ocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6614/can-...
|
| "At the too low horizontal frequency, the period the switch
| is open becomes too long, that causes the following"
| [various bad things explained]
| evmar wrote:
| In the early ChromeOS days when they were thinking about which
| graphics stack to use, the quiet but definitive top manager said,
| if they picked X11, that he'd better not see any stipple on boot.
| It's such a funny comment that stayed with me because it really
| captures how seeing that stipple is such a symbol of "I guess
| you're booting X11 now", and his insight on how it's not what he
| wanted the first impression of the product to be.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Sun 4c crowd represent! Pop up X windows over from jarthur, a 32
| way SMP machine using 386's in order to cover up some of that
| sweet stipple action. Retro, indeed!
| sctb wrote:
| As a youngster, the first time I managed to get Slackware
| installed via floppies, I was having a great time chatting with
| ircII and browsing with lynx. Someone on IRC told me I needed X
| Windows and I was like, that sounds cool, so I learned as much as
| I could to try to get a working config with my video card. Many
| hours later I got startx to take over the screen and now I'm
| staring at the stipple and X cursor.
|
| It looked _broken_ , and I assumed it was broken, so I gave up.
| It took me a long time to get the concept of window managers, but
| eventually I understood and realized that I had actually gotten X
| working that time years ago. Gosh.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| In the very early 90s, my dad started using some sort of unix
| again (I don't know if it was an early linux or a BSD of some
| sort.) Up until that point, I'd only ever seen him used windows
| 3.1 or some raw terminal/TTY emulator.
|
| It was winter and suddenly his screen was a fuzzy grey, with
| funny looking windows, instead of the comforting (to me) windows
| teal.
|
| At the time, it represented to me, a change into the unkonwn. As
| it was (assume) the start of a new contract (my dad worked at
| home alot) it was also a time of financial pressure.
|
| So to me, I hated X, and how it looked. It was to me, the
| equivalent of a brutalist housing block. Well built sure, but
| foreboding to look at.
|
| Later when I was I was using Linux my self (around redhat 5/6) If
| you suddenly saw that you were dropping into a "natural" X, It
| was a sign that you'd fucked up the window manager, or that the
| switch between gnome and E (or which ever one you were trying)
| had gone wrong.
|
| I kinda like it now though.
| worik wrote:
| > I hated X, and how it looked. It was to me, the equivalent of
| a brutalist housing block. Well built sure, but foreboding to
| look at.
|
| Yes
|
| Taste, it is a subjective thing
|
| That's why I loved it
| drooopy wrote:
| The stipple and X cursor are forever ingrained into my
| memories. I remember it so vividly how back in 1998 when I
| installed my first Linux distro (suse 6-ish) and after some
| configuring i typed "startx" and then BOOM! Grey "unix-y"
| weirdness for a minute or two and then KDE 1. It will never not
| hit me with immense levels of nostalgia whenever I come across
| it, which admittedly is not very often these days.
| colanderman wrote:
| Saw the stipple just last week on a (presumably) failed startup
| of an airplane's seat back entertainment system. Not the X cursor
| but the normal X11 arrow. Recognized it immediately and was, in
| my own way, entertained.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| "Did your blood pressure raise looking at that?
|
| Mine did." HOLY **!
|
| My blood pressure rose, my hands started shaking, and my feet
| went cold. After someone let out the happy smoke out of a
| monitor, I would always triple check everything... everything...
| and then adjust... then change the monitor with the fiberglass
| screwdriver... you are SCARING ME! but ... the GDM-1907 really
| did work at 1280x1025, with a front porch in phase.
| ben7799 wrote:
| Wow this one hit me with major nostalgia.
|
| I remember hacking away at the X Config files for a long time
| installing slackware on my 486 laptop and some external displays
| in 1995-1996 and being super worried about breaking stuff.
|
| That was kind of before you could look stuff up easily on the
| internet, plus you might not have had the modem or ethernet card
| working in linux yet either.
| frithsun wrote:
| Holding my first child for the first time decades later
| approached the sense of otherworldly bliss and joy that I
| experienced when, as a young teen in the mid nineties, I got X to
| work on my 486.
| Izkata wrote:
| > If you are of a certain vintage, this image is burned indelibly
| somewhere in your posterior parietal complex:
|
| > Oh, my old friend. How it's been a long time.
|
| Heh, basically the opposite for me.
|
| I switched to linux in 2008, Ubuntu on an HP laptop. For the most
| part it "just worked" and I never really _needed_ to edit the X
| configs, but I do remember fiddling with them occasionally for
| some reason. I think it was for some peripheral or other (like a
| mouse, when I usually used the touchpad).
|
| Generally at the time I'd only see this backround if I was
| experimenting with my window manager and it crashed. Ubuntu was
| using Metacity at the time, and I'd switched to Beryl and was
| going wild with customizations. And when the window manager
| crashed and all I had was that and windows I couldn't move, I had
| no idea how to recover and had to hard boot.
|
| I'm fairly sure Ubuntu was hiding this on startup already at that
| time, if not very shortly afterwards.
| somat wrote:
| My understanding is the root weave is a pattern designed to be
| hard on your monitor(a crt when it was designed). It is ugly as
| sin but that tight flip from black to white was intended to
| expose any weakness in the driving beam, ether from
| misconfiguration or components failing. Where another pattern may
| obscure the problem. I think it is also rough on lcd's where a
| misbehaving one really sparkles on the weave.
|
| I am not sure why it was the default, I suspect it was to give
| you a chance to see how your monitor was behaving on a fresh
| install and you were expected to set the background to something
| else.. I still run the root weave on my desktop, it is obsd with
| their xenocera where it is still the default. but I also run a
| tiling window manager so only actually see the root window once
| in a blue moon.
| pimeys wrote:
| I started usinc Linux around the same time with RedHat 5.0. I do
| remember that even with Metro getting the X server running was
| not super easy and took me a few weeks and a few trips to the
| library to finally have a working GUI.
|
| Oh man good times.
| mjg59 wrote:
| "So knowing now that root weave and all of that is from 1986,
| should I send X.Org a pull request to rename the
| party_like_its_1989 global variable to party_like_its_1986 or
| party_like_the_1980s"
|
| Well, that would kind of spoil the Prince reference
| aunwick wrote:
| I remember looking at that screen wondering if my mouse was going
| to work this time...
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