The Stipple
Okay. So. The X-window system used some pattern of stippled black and white pixels as its initial, unconfigured default background. This blog post is about the history of that, finding out when it went away, and what that means.
X used to be very difficult to configure, in that you had to type a lot of stuff into a hand-written config file, and the numbers you had to type were specific to your hardware, and you had to find them out somehow without a desktop (or, probably, the internet.)
X managed monitors, keyboards (hahahahaha), mice, and windows.
The stipple pattern this article is about is the first thing you would see if things were going reasonably well.
Why is the pattern what it is? No idea, but it became distinctive and also has a lot of off and on so i squite good at testing your monitor is as good as it says it is.
The Stipple No More!
At some point during the early 2010s, the stipple was no more! It stopped appearing :( where did it g??
Well, the when is sorted: in Sep. 2008, a commit landed that added a flag called -retro that tracks a global variable, party_like_its_1989 and this commit removes the default stipple and cursor from the boot process, so instead the first thing you’ll see is whatever actual desktop you configured to start on boot.
The why? Out with the old, in with the new, as evidenced by that variable name. This happened when systemd was being introduced, boot times were being reduced and in general people were trying to modernize aspects of Linux.
Getting it back
“still use startx? I’m guessing not;” but there’s an argument if you do. (Lol, I was using it on my pi until relatively recently…)
Then you can put it into the ~/.xserverrc file to make it permanent.
Gnome users seem to be out of luck, and can’t pass arbitrary options to the X-server. Others display managers can probably.
What is the Stipple?
How is it defined? - As an asset: a bitmap in a folder, - Hardcoded inline value literal in a source code file
The X.org implementation is a fork of XFree86 (they had a fight over a license term, don’t worry about it). Which was itself descended from various other window manager projects. It goes far back! In every repo. he looked at, he found both definitions of the bitmap.
XFree86 was based on a Project Athena (as is X1 i think)
So, it started somewhere between X1 (1984) and Feb. 1986.
more fun!
Turns out there’s a bunch of bitmaps that ship with X. Various meshes/weaves.
There’s also a little “you’ve got mail” icon, a few other mail icons, some pointers, “scales”, a “tie fighter”, some snowflakes, logos and finally a cartoon “woman” (just her face and hair, for once the very old open source project didn’t use a chauvanist test image of a woman).
Project Athena
This is pretty interesting - was a joint project between MIT and IBM to develop a campus-wide distributed computing system for educational use, so lots of students can download educational materials and such.
Still in use apparently! Got a lot of history and importance. It’s where all X stuff comes from. And distributed computing.
Other bits
There was a project called Metro-X that had a really good configuration window that, impressively for its time, was able to correctly probe device characteristics like “what resolution am I plugged into”.
Woah apparetly ancient code is still in current X implementations. Which is cool from a “wow the old code was very good” point of view, but bad from a “old decisions do too much” point of view.
Windows 3.1 (and 3.0) let you edit the tiles for the desktop display background, and also had surprisingly decent menus.
my questions
- Why can’t someone emulate X1 and see what it does?
- ah! ImageMagick is the cli tool i should use… (hehe clitool, aka a dual pronged vibrator… ANYWAY) to make smaller webp images for my website!
- i want to use a tiling window manager. they seem cool. nothing to do with this article.
- this was really interesting! actually!