X Window System Administrator's Guide: For X Version 11 (1992) | Hacker News Reader

X Window System Administrator's Guide: For X Version 11 (1992)

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75 pointsecliptik29 comments

Besides being very useful, the X volumes helped O'Reilly & Associates grow, which was great for our field.

O'Reilly became famous for the "animal books", which were often indispensable bibles for a software technology.

Today, many of us will attack any problem via StackOverflow or Googling (or laundering open source with LLMs), framed as how to do a very particular something in a stack of software we understand maybe <1% about. (And sometimes we get certifications by studying for a test, as a way to promote our careers.)

But if we wanted to actually understand some level better, such that we don't have to ask as much "How do I do this specific thing, just tell me what to type?", but instead "How does this thing work conceptually, and what are the interfaces?", the documentation we need is usually poor and hard to discover, or nonexistent.

Example: At least one major cloud provider apparently has huge trouble keeping their documentation complete and accurate, and also generates a lot of noise of low-quality documents. (Maybe someone ran the numbers, and found that good docs isn't needed to attract and retain customers at this point of their market position, and poor docs means they sell more support contracts?)

Fortunately, there are still great technical books being published. (Example: if you're an experienced systems programmer wanting to use Rust, IMHO the first book you should read is the Blandy, et al. "Programming Rust" animal book from O'Reilly, and then keep it on your virtual bookshelf forever, for reference.)

I hope that "StackOverflow methodology" and LLMs don't further hurt the market for books and learning, and that we'll continue to see great books from O'Reilly and other publishers.

Having the full set of the volumes on a shelf was quite the power play back in the day - and you needed a long and sturdy shelf. It's been discussed before on HN but it was honestly always kind of baffling to me how any UI toolkit could be so damned complicated as to require so much dead tree to cover it all, especially once things like VB6 got off the ground.

> It's been discussed before on HN but it was honestly always kind of baffling to me how any UI toolkit could be so damned complicated as to require so much dead tree to cover it all, especially once things like VB6 got off the ground.

It wasn't/isn't just a UI toolkit. The O'Reilly series covered all the parts of X, from the drawing primitives, to higher level Xlib, to managing X servers and clients. The equivalent on Windows would be a book series covering GDI, Win32, and configuring every Registry and Group Policy tweak in the Windows shell.

> and configuring every Registry and Group Policy tweak in the Windows shell.

Yeah and that in detail, not just the one line description you get which is often incomplete and sometimes outright misleading.

I believe (dont remember fully, going back 30 years almost) that SCO or HP (or perhaps Sun?) shipped you the full set of these with a developer sdk license.

So, where I worked, as we had multiple licenses and we really only needed to keep one or sets around, teenage me got to take a set home. With that said, my memory is that a large chunk of them was mostly the man pages printed out.

The full set of HP-UX manuals and the full set of X11 manuals are right next to me on the shelf.

I have fond memories playing the "man game" or the "reverse man game". In the former, player one calls out the name of a UNIX command, and player two needs to recite the one-line description. In the latter, player one reads out the description and player to needs to guess which command is thus described.

While the UNIX manuals (section 3 (API) and especially section 1 (commands)) are well-used, I admittedly didn't use the X11 set as often: the most-used page of the X manual set is the one where it says how to set the DISPLAY variable.

I have three volumes on my bookshelf. Volume 0 is a reference for the X protocol itself. Volume 1 covers programming with Xlib, and Volume 2 is the Xlib reference.

The linked to book appears to be how to administrate an X server. And I know at least one volume covers a higher level toolkit other than Xlib (Athena widget set maybe?)

Four volumes cover Motif and XView, with a guide and reference volume for each. The Xt Intrinsics volume also uses Athena as the widget toolkit.

It's the other way around. Athena and Motif use Xt. I don't know about XView.

I think you misunderstood what i wrote.

I didn't write that Xt itself is using Athena, i wrote that the "Xt Intrinsics volume" (i.e. the book) uses Athena as the widget toolkit. Xt itself does not provide any widgets so you need some widgets to show what it does and the book uses Athena for that.

> how any UI toolkit

O'Reilly's X Window volumes are not about a toolkit, they document everything that could be relevant to someone about X Windows at the time, including the X protocol itself, the low level X library, a user's guide, the linked administrator's guide and two widget toolkits - Motif and XView - with both references and guides to them.

> once things like VB6 got off the ground.

VB6 also had a ton of documentation, to the point where it wasn't feasible to print it all. VB5 had a 1064 page reference book and a 898 page guide book, among others. Hell, even VB1 for DOS had a 510 page reference book and a 658 page guide book. And these things only discussed a fraction of what the X Windows books did.

I used to have shelves and shelves of books related to various Borland programming tools, DOS/PC technical references, etc. In the pre-web/broadband PC world you didn't really have the equivalent of man pages or a lot of online references generally.

If I recall correctly, even the motif part required multiple books.

We had the whole set in the college library and it took up a whole shelf. I often looked in awe at it, but it didn't seem to get much use.

Yeah, volumes 6a and 6b, one being the manual, the other being the reference.

It was a different time. Even a simple "office" style package for DOS came with multiple volumes of dead trees. Most of the stuff in there was the kind of stuff we don't document anymore these days because they're considered self-explanatory.

Of course the waterfall model and lack of online updates made this more feasible. When updates were shipped once a year or so they often came with paper addendums you could clip into the binders.

These days software changes too fast for such documentation to keep up, but I feel we've gone too far, it's often hard to find any clear word on what something does now.

Just last week I was taking a stroll at my college's mathematical library and I stumbled upon a gigantic row of thick books. Wouldn't you know it, it was this exact collection of documentation about X version 11. The full set in all its glory.

> 8.2.1 Do You Have Enough Disk Space?

If you build and install all of core+contrib you might need as much as 900 megabytes of disk space. Outrageous!

The first Mac I had was released in 1993 and had an 80 megabyte hard drive

I had a 5 MB hard drive for my Commodore 64 (D9060)!

My SE/30 had a 20Mb disk. Such a luxurious amount of storage at the time.

One summer many years ago I had to figure out how to build X11 on a VAX split across a couple of RA60 disk drives (~200MB). Learned a lot about filesystems, mounts and links (not to mention build environments), but considering it would be a couple of days to crash out each build and figure out what I'd done wrong it was less than fun. We got a couple of RA81s later (~450MB) which gave significantly more elbow room.

Many of the SPARCstations we had at work around that time had a 200MB hard drive. So yeah, it kind of was a lot.

So we stuck a build of X11 on our servers and mounted it over NFS. It started up a bit slower, but you generally only started an X session once a day (or for some people, once a month), so it was OK.

Ah, memories... For people who did not have (or have not seen) the full set of O'Reilly's X books, I still remember the whole series, since I had it on the shelf behind me:

   0: X Protocol Reference Manual
   1: Xlib Programming Manual
   2: Xlib Reference Manual
   3: X Window System User's Guide
   3M: X Window System User's Guide OSF/Motif Edition
   3O: OPEN LOOK User's Guide (never published)
   4: XToolkit Programming Manual
   4M: X Toolkit Programming Manual OSF/Motif Edition
   5: XToolkit Reference Manual
   6A: Motif Programming Manual
   6B: Motif Reference Manual
   7A: XView Programming Manual
   7B: XView Reference Manual
   8: X Window System Administrator's Guide

Some of them had multiple editions ("new, for X11 Release 4"). There was also a separate supplement book for... R6? And a lay-flat book "The X Window System in a Nutshell". Oh, and issues of the X Journal, which slowly generated the letter X on their collective spines. All these covered almost a complete shelf.

Sometimes I'm amazed by the amount of money we were spending to be able to do our work. On the other hand, I definitely used volumes 0, 1, 2, 4, 5, and 8 a lot!

I used to check out the O'Reilly X11 series of books from my college library in the mid 1990's. This is the one volume that I actually bought and still have on my bookshelf.

My first IT job was in tech support for X11 servers. I barely ever opened any of those books. Man pages were so much better.

I will be downvoted for this post. How is this not blatant copyright infringement? Did O'Reilly re-license the content for sharing? I doubt it.

You're downvoted because you didn't bother to even look at the copyright citation on the linked Archive.org page. Specifically:

> Copyright-comment

> Scanned under the Creative Commons Founders' Copyright license, per Tim O'Reilly.

Yes, O'Reilly did, in fact, re-license the content for sharing:

https://www.oreilly.com/pub/pr/1042

Cool. Thank you to clarify. Based on my screen layout, it was way off screen (below). That is great news and makes good sense. Tim O'Reilly is very forward thinking. I wonder what their annual revenue from that title was when he decided to relicense it for sharing?

"I got into my head you did something wrong, and I'm going to smugly call you out publicly that you've done something wrong. But I'm not going to take a single second to figure out if my accusation has any basis in fact." No shit you're going to get a downvote.

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