Your MacX (or other 68k X11 sever) experiences

[avadondragon]

I haven't really used X11 forwarding much. Just once to play with some GUI apps on a supercomputer I had access to and wanted to see what was possible with it. I was lying in bed and the thought came to me that I remembered seeing X11 servers for classic Mac OS and I started wondering if there were practical uses for it. eg - Surf the web using my RaSCSI's browser and drop my downloads into my netatalk share folder. I mean yeah there are other ways to do that but maybe I just happen to ONLY have my 89k Mac handy and I'd like a modern web experience using it for some reason.

I noticed that it looked like it was possible to use 1-bit displays from one of the screenshots. Also the min system for one version was 6.0.5... Can you run an X server on a compact Mac? Other than SE/30 or Classic II that is. I could potentially see running an instance of Basilisk II (or sheepshver) to use some apps or otherwise do some things I couldn't normally with say a Mac Plus running system 6. You could potentially use it to directly manipulate your Hard disk's image and Unstuff using version 5.5 and the speed of the Pi for instance. Or mount an image with a later version of DiskCopy and drag the contents out to your disk. IDK seems like there could be useful stuff you could do.

 

[avadondragon]

Hm... No one? I guess I know what my next retro Mac project is now - Adventures with X11 on a Mac! I couldn't find much online about this except a couple of screenshots which made it look like it should actually work. I always assumed that it doesn't work well since I haven't heard anyone talk about it.

 

[robin-fo]

This is A/UX software running on a real Quadra 700 and displayed on a modern Mac

 

[Phipli]

I've had a bit of a mess with it on a PowerMac G3, possibly on a 68k mac. I didn't have anything specific to do and got distracted by the included OpenGL drivers which led me down a road that allowed me to get a compatibility layer and use glitchy accelerated OpenGL on a Rage II+. Badly.

 

[NJRoadfan]

My one experience was running MacX on a IIci under A/UX. It was........ painful. Opening up anything beyond the basic xeyes and such was a bit taxing and classic MacOS wasn't known for it's memory management or stability. It did manage to run a web browser though, despite complaints that the X Server wasn't X11R6 compatible and that certain functions would be missing. The native X Server was a bit more stable, just don't try running a modern window server remotely!