The OS/2 Files

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General info

The X11 windowing system is the standard on Unix-like systems for displaying windows. It can roughly be compared to OS/2's Presentation Manager. The XFree86 Consortium provides a freeware port for Intel x86 based platforms. Holger Veit and Frank Giessler ported XFree86 to OS/2 and eComStation (eCS).

X11 systems have a client/server structure. The so-called X server (the displaying system) offers its capabilities to the X clients (the applications) to display their output. Due to the X systems networking capabilities server and client can be sited on different machines which are connected via a network (e.g. a TCP/IP LAN or a TCP/IP based dial-up connection).

Now you might ask what to do with a Unix system when you're running OS/2. Well, using XFree86/OS2 and its client/server architecture offers you the following possibilities:

What makes the whole thing especially interesting is the fact that Unix programs can relatively easy be ported to OS/2 with the help of the emx package. This package consists of some libraries that provide Unix-features which OS/2 and eCS lack and the GNU gcc compiler that can be used to compile e.g. C, C++, Objective C, Ada95 and Fortran77 programs. Using emx it sometimes is enough to compile the Unix programs' source code to get a working program.
Meanwhile lots of programs have been ported and the list is growing...

Please take a look at the following highlights of ported applications:

XFree86OS/2 is not able to display windows seamlessly on the OS/2 desktop, but can be run at the same time. Since it directly accesses the video hardware, it is also very fast. There's a Netlabs project called Everblue which aims at making seamless X windows on the OS/2 desktop possible, similar to packages like the withdrawn PMX from IBM, Hummingbird's Exceed or HOBLink X11.

Installing XFree86/OS2 seems a bit complicated first, but if you follow the instructions given in the distributions README and the pretty extensive step-by-step guides on these pages there should be no big problems. You can make your life easier by purchasing a Team Trier Collection CD which contains XFree86 3.3.6 which can directly be installed from the CD.

Well, there are some "disadvantages" using XFree86/OS2:

To be fair one has to say that most of these disadvantages are not the ones of XFree86/OS2, but result from Unix systems' structure. In the following you can find some directions to ease your life with XFree86/OS2.