Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!cernvax!pan!jw From: jw@pan.UUCP (Jamie Watson) Newsgroups: comp.windows.x Subject: Re: X11 on RT with AIX? Message-ID: <481@pan.UUCP> Date: 20 Sep 88 21:44:54 GMT References: <148@sunquest.UUCP> <5756@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> <7109@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> Reply-To: jw@pan.UUCP (Jamie Watson) Organization: Adasoft AG, Solothurn, Switzerland Lines: 43 Listen, I think people are really being unfair to the RT/PC in this discussion. I do not disagree with what has been said; in fact, I have seen virtually all of the problems that Dan Heller described in his posting, and I know that Dan is a careful and honest person, so I have no doubt that everything he said was correct. Likewise, the posting from Alexander Denner about xterm; I have never seen an xterm hang the system, but I can crash xterm on my RT anytime I want, with any of several different commands. The problem is that we are all commenting on a *BETA* release of V11 from IBM, and I for one expect to find problems like this in beta software. The important fact, for me, is that IBM is willing to send this beta software out, apparently to quite a few people, and that it appears that they will meet their announced delivery of a real release of V11 this month. The beta version is already very fast, as everyone has commented on, and I think it is pretty good all things considered; if they have worked out these problems over the past 6 weeks or so since the last beta release, then the full release should be a very solid piece of software. In fact, the most significant problems with the beta release are in the area of color support. Dan didn't explicity say so, but I'm sure that the problems he described were on a color display; I use a monochrome display every day, and I don't have any of the problems he described. I taught an X class last week using some systems with color displays, and I would agree that the state of things on those machines was pretty dismal. Our company started looking to buy some new workstations at the first of this year. We talked extensively to DEC, HP, Sun and IBM. One of the things we were careful to ask each one was when they would be delivering X.V11. DEC, Sun and HP all three said either May or June, and IBM said September. Well, it's now September; the last I heard, you could get a beta V11 release from HP, DEC had finally announced their V11 release but no one had seen the tapes yet, and Sun was still trying to figure out how to finish the NeWS/X server. I would think that it would be fair to wait and compare the official releases from all four before engaging in a lot of IBM-bashing. By the way, you can be sure that if the final release from IBM has many (any) of the same bugs as these beta releases, I will be heard screaming as loud as anyone about it. jw