Reviving Old X Code

Note: the author is Keith Packard, who <i>wrote</i> a ton of the original X Window System code. I adored that system! The idea of running graphical code on multiple machines, then displaying the results locally, has yet to be surpassed.<p>&quot;In 2011, O&#x27;Reilly awarded an open source award to Packard, as &quot;the person behind most of the improvements made on the open source desktop in the last ten years at least.&quot;&quot; -- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Keith_Packard" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Keith_Packard</a>

Funny, he mentions the Xaw fonts, I was just looking at something similar. I&#x27;ve been using XTerm with Xft support for years but never really thought about it, how come the text in the menus and toolbars is so crunchy?<p>I eventually tracked it down, Xaw3dXft operates in compatibility mode by default. A oneline patch enables all the new features, and makes a world of difference.<p>Here&#x27;s a screenshot, I think it&#x27;s night and day: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;taviso&#x2F;status&#x2F;1344779126767435776" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;taviso&#x2F;status&#x2F;1344779126767435776</a><p>I mailed a patch to the maintainer, hopefully the next version will fix it!

&gt;Imagine trying to build Windows or Mac OS code from the early 90&#x27;s on a modern OS...<p>I guess, in Windows case it also should be relatively easy?

TL:DR version - People who love programming are not shy or afraid of going from just needing to update copyrights to converting K&amp;R to ANSI-C, fixing pointer bugs, adding new widgets and even finding new card images in SVG to make it look all better! Hope these KGames updates land in Debian unstable soon.<p>Also I wondered from the headline why keithp is into XCode - might be better to have used X11 code instead.

Looking at bug – <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.debian.org&#x2F;cgi-bin&#x2F;bugreport.cgi?bug=974011" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.debian.org&#x2F;cgi-bin&#x2F;bugreport.cgi?bug=974011</a> – there is all this talk about copyright of the xmille and mille computer programs, I don&#x27;t see any discussion of the question of the copyright of the underlying card game.<p>Mille Bornes was invented by Arthur Dujardin (using pen name Edmond Dujardin), illustrated by Joseph Le Callennec, and first released in 1954 [0]. Dujardin died in 1964 [1], so using EU copyright term of author&#x27;s life + 70 years, its copyright would expire in 2034. Le Callennec died in 1988, so copyright on the original illustrations would expire in 2058. (I don&#x27;t know how dependent the illustrations in the computer game are on the original.)<p>I&#x27;m not sure who currently owns the copyrights to the original card game. But Dujardin founded the Dujardin company which still sells Mille Bornes [3] so I would assume they still do. Since 2007, the Dujardin company has been owned by the French TV network TF1 [4].<p>The copyright owners to the card game have probably never heard of this obscure non-commercial computer game. Who knows if they&#x27;d react to it indulgently or not.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mille_Bornes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mille_Bornes</a> but actually the French article has a lot more information: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fr.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;1000_bornes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fr.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;1000_bornes</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fr.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Edmond_Dujardin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fr.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Edmond_Dujardin</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fr.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Joseph_Le_Callennec" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fr.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Joseph_Le_Callennec</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jeuxdujardin.fr&#x2F;produit&#x2F;milles-bornes-pegboardable" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jeuxdujardin.fr&#x2F;produit&#x2F;milles-bornes-pegboardab...</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fr.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dujardin_(%C3%A9diteur)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fr.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dujardin_(%C3%A9diteur)</a>

I&#x27;m not saying we&#x27;re going to bring this guy&#x27;s site down... but we&#x27;re totally going to bring this guy&#x27;s site down.<p>Just going to leave this right here... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20210103182219&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keithp.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;kgames&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20210103182219&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keithp.co...</a>

A few years ago, I rebuilt my projects from my undergrad graphics class in 1991. They were written on 32-bit Decstations running ULTRIX, and worked after only a few changes on FreeBSD&#x2F;amd64. Most of the changes were actually just to fix up some header file includes. I was surprised that that they worked just fine.

I&#x27;ve never seen a UI described as &quot;rustic&quot; before, but I love it.

I&#x27;m wondering a few things regarding network transparency:<p>- Are vector graphics drawn by the X toolkit, or is the bitmap transferred in uncompressed form to the X server for drawing?<p>- The same regarding antialiased fonts: does the antialiasing happen at the client, or the server-side?<p>I would tend to guess that both happen at the client side, which ends up transferring bitmaps to the server. There&#x27;s hardly any advantage to X&#x27;s architecture if you end up transferring bitmaps...

I&#x27;ve been building <i>ANCIENT</i> Unix programs from the tuhs site, almost everything just works on modern Debian. Even the odd X11 program builds and runs fine.

live xmille, great job keith!<p>one if the new cards says vehicle prioritaire. given card names are in French should be vehicule prioritaire i guess....