[TUHS] Early GUI on Linux

[Will Senn]

Hi Paul,

I remember downloading SLS with X ( a bunch of floppy images) over a 300 
baud connection via a VMS gateway to the internet somewhere in late 1991 
or early 1992. I think this might have been less than a year after the 
0.9 kernel was released. So, if there was something prior to X, it was 
extremely short lived. Slackware took SLS and bundled it with X 
providing that as a basis for a Linux kit, so to speak, and I seem to 
remember everybody I know using that until Redhat came along and Debian, 
etc. Of course there were others, but SLS/X and Slackware were early, 
early days.

Will

On 2/25/23 3:31 PM, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
> I think discussion of early Linux is in scope for this list, after all that is 30 years ago. Warren, if that is a mis-assumption please slap my wrist.
>
> Following on from the recent discussion of early workstations and windowing systems, I’m wondering about early windowing on Linux. I only discovered Linux in the later nineties (Red Hat 4.x I think), and by that time Linux already seemed to have settled on Xfree86. At that time svgalib was still around but already abandoned.
>
> By 1993 even student class PC hardware already outperformed the workstations of the early/mid eighties, memory was much more abundant and pixels were no longer bits but bytes (making drawing easier). Also, early Linux was (I think) more local machine oriented, not LAN oriented. Maybe a different system than X would have made sense.
>
> In short, I could imagine a frame buffer device and a compositor for top-level windows (a trail that had been pioneered by Oriel half a decade before), a declarative widget set inspired by the contemporary early browsers and the earlier NeWS, etc. Yet nothing like that happened as far as I know. I vaguely recall an OS from the late 90’s that mixed Linux with a partly in-kernel GUI called “Berlin” or something like that, but I cannot find any trace of that today, so maybe I misremember.
>
> So here are a few things that I am interested in and folks on this list might remember:
>
> - were there any window systems popular on early Linux other than X?
>
> - was there any discussion of alternatives to X?
>
> - was there any discussion of what kernel support for graphics was appropriate?
>
>