X11 and xTerminals have been around for decades. The idea is to separate
the GUI from the CPU. So drop down menus, window management, mouse,
keyboard, audio and other user-facing aspects are all a separate
framework. In the days of yore you could actually buy dumb xterms and
have a room full of them hooked to a single CPU over ethernet. That
said, xterm displays and such are now just software used to support
connections to remote computers (almost always unix) with something more
than a command line. As has been mentioned, xterm and the x11 apps that
run on it are not accessible and, based on the vintage of the
technology, probably will never be. There is less and less need for
xterms with web clients, screen sharing and desktop computers
everywhere. It did have some neat features that I could, in theory, have
a computer anywhere on the internet and route its GUI display to my Mac
running xterm, but how useful is that today with other screen sharing
apps readily available? They had a whole system set up where the remote
CPU could send a command to my xterm to pop a new window of certain size
and location. My xterm could also send a command back saying the window
was moved from one location to another. All very low bandwidth stuff.
Today bandwidth is such that they just do a brute force method to take
screen shots 10 times a second and send that whole video stream over the
wire. Who needs delicate frameworks when you can do that, and it handles
anything that can be thrown on the screen.
Anyway, just some history. Today you have to install the Xcode developer
stuff to get x11 since most people don't need or care about this, and
most developers probably wouldn't either. Just for fun I went ahead and
did this (1.8GB download for Xcode). After installing I went to terminal
and did a cd into the X11 directory
cd /usr/X11/bin
and then did
xcalc &
which fires up an x11 calculator. Voiceover couldn't even find the
calcualtor window in the xterminal. Even if it did, it would probably
just be a big giant bitmap as far as VO was concerned. With XCode
installed you can do a
man X
to read more about xwindows.
CB
On 2/8/12 10:05 AM, Paul Erkens wrote:
Dear listers,
What I know so far. From what I googled, x11 is software that gives you a
framework with display support, and also a rich set of input devices. Using
x11, a client program can be built. All that is often used to access remote
computers. Where you log in to your mac being the only user, there are other
computers that you don't need to sit behind, if you want to use them. Instead,
you log in over a network or over the internet, and you get time cycles from a
remote machine, allocated to your programs that you use. Not only you, but a
lot of users can be logged in to such a remote machine, each over their own
internet connection, each user running their own programs, simultaneous with
the other users. Such a remote machine is called a time sharing computer.
Correct so far?
Why is x11 installed by the lion installer, and if an application is built
using x11, is it accessible by voiceover then?
Paul.
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