XMX Version 1
Version 1 of XMX is no longer developed, maintained or even used here
at Brown. More recent versions of XMX should be better in most every
way, but I include this information here because many people have used
it over the years, and perhaps it is still of use to someone somewhere.
Description
XMX version 1 multicasts a complete X session (as opposed to individual
windows) to any number of X servers. The X server which provides input
to the shared X client applications (the "master") is established at setup
time and remains fixed throughout the session. Similarly, the "slave" servers
which participate in the multicast are established at the start. There
is no facility for adding or removing a server to or from the session.
Version 1 does not tolerate private work, and expects to be the only
X client on each of the X servers to which it connects. It can be thought
of as "taking over" each X server.
History
Version 1 was developed in 1987 and 1988 as a utility for doing
in-class demonstrations. It was released to the Internet community as
freeware in 1990. Work on it ceased at that time. The final version was
version 1.1, which differs from 1.0 primarily in that it can be compiled
under Solaris 2.x.
Version 1 remains available and useful today, as it relies only on
the X11 Protocol, which has not changed and is not likely to.
Getting It
XMX version 1 is available via anonymous ftp. The URL is
ftp://ftp.cs.brown.edu/pub/xmx/xmx-1.1.tar.Z
Problems
XMX version 1 is not a standard, well-behaved, X client application. It
does things that X clients shouldn't do, and it expects to be run in a
very specific way. Casual users frequently run into problems.
I've assembled a list of
Frequently Asked Questions to help with these
problems.
References
I've written nothing about version 1, but a good description of the
system appears in
- Oliver Jones, "Multidisplay Software in X: A Survey of Architectures",
The X Resource, Issue 6, O'Reilly & Associates, 1993.
John Bazik