SGI's X (Re: X on the Personal Iris)

[James Helman]

venkat at csun4.cs.uh.edu (Venkat Viswanathan) writes:

  2) Xsgi keeps crashing on a regular basis and dumps core onto the root
     partition. It regenerates itself automatically though.

Yes, it does crash a lot, doesn't it.  But count yourself lucky that
the IRIX 3.2 version doesn't crash as often as previous versions did.
Another big plus: text is always printed right side up now.
Seriously, SGI's X is a lot faster and a lot more usable now than ever
before.  But it is still too buggy for a real product.

I'm amazed that products like this could get throuch QC.  Most of the
worst bugs in SGI's X server, in this and in previous releases, have
shown up within 5 minutes of use.  Perhaps, their beta sites have to
sign an agreement to only use xterm and have no more than one window
open at a time. ;-)

The question that I would REALLY like the answer to (besides the
obvious, when can I get a better release) is whether the SGI stuff on
the X11R4 tape runs better or worse than the stuff shipped with IRIX
3.2.  Any answers from SGI?  Any experience from the real world?

BTW, don't bother trying to get anyplace with the hotline on this.
I've been going around with them for over a year about X.  The best
they can do is put you on the "hot list" for the next release.  The
support "engineer" who answered my latest X call, after making a
couple pointless digressions, focussed on THE REAL PROBLEM, asking
whether the final "b" in "exit status: 0x8b" was capitalized or not.

Jim Helman
Department of Applied Physics			P.O. Box 10494
Stanford University				Stanford, CA 94309
(jim at thrush.stanford.edu) 			(415) 723-4940