Re: Adventures in GNOME... X Terminals A-Go-Go!

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

<quote who="Michael Meeks">

> On Tue, 2002-09-03 at 08:52, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> >     This means turning off anti-aliasing, because XFT is client-side (fonts
> >     don't look so bad without it anyway).
> 
> 	Interesting; I've run Gnome 2.0 over remote X to a Solaris box and not
> seen so much pain :-) but then perhaps that's down to expectations.

Yeah, the text isn't a huge issue, but it's a bit speedier without XFT.

Interestingly enough, totem runs okay, watching the GUAD3C video. ;-) It'd
be cool to have a compressed video stream extension for X or something...
Not sure how useful it would be in common use though.

> >     It also means turning off Nautilus on the desktop, because the canvas is
> >     primarily client-side. Dragging windows around with Nautilus on the
> >     desktop hurts
> 
> 	You have full-window dragging turned on ? outline dragging should be
> more painless, surely ?

Ah, wish I could. (Havoc.) :-)

> >     Menu icons are done client-side too, so if you turn them off, menus will
> >     be faster. They'll also be uglier and harder to read. ;-)
> 
> 	The thing is - that, as I see it the icon rendering should be purely
> client side & push using X render, and not involve any round-trips. But
> then again, since we create, populate and tear down ~2 XRenderPictures
> per icon render - this doesn't seem like it's going to be all that
> efficient; I'd be interested to know the roundtrip cost of that all.
> 
> 	Clearly - you need XRender on the client to enjoy any of the advantages
> of that; do you have XRender on the client's X server ?

Yeah, RENDER is happy on the X server. The terminal is a diskless Intel box,
running X4.1, however it is all running over a 100mbit hub.

> >   - Choose an easy-to-render GTK+ theme
> >
> >     That means low-pixmap count, and very few things to draw...
> 
> 	I'd hope that the theme would be using server side resources far more
> heavily than anything else - and as such would not have any real impact.

It's a good reality check for people trying to run pixmap themes and such
over X/tcp, though.

Thanks,

- Jeff

-- 
     "Free software never simply picks up its marbles and goes home." -     
                            Jonathan Corbet, LWN