Accelerated-X is a proprietary port of the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wit ...

to Intel x86 machines.

History

The Accelerated-X server is built on top of the

X386 X386 was an implementation of the X Window System for IBM PC compatible computers. It ran on systems with Intel 386 or later processors, running Unix System V-based operating systems, and supported a variety of VGA-compatible graphics cards. X386 wa ...

X server that was created by Thomas Roell for X11 Release 5. He founded a company in

Colorado Colorado (, other variants) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It encompasses most of the Southern Rocky Mountains, as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of t ...

named Xi Graphics which still provides the Accelerated-X server. The

XFree86 XFree86 is an implementation of the X Window System. It was originally written for Unix-like operating systems on IBM PC compatibles and was available for many other operating systems and platforms. It is free and open source software under the X ...

project was created as a free alternative to what became the Accelerated-X server.

Features

Accelerated-X server provides an "overlay mode" on several

graphics card A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer moni ...

s which allows running ancient, 256 color mode-only Unix alongside more modern applications on truecolor 24-bit displays. It used to provide much better driver support (hardware acceleration, 3D and compatibility, especially on integrated graphics) than XFree86, at a time when the major graphics chipset vendors were not supporting

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

officially.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Xi Graphics and Accelerated-X
Windowing systems Computer-related introductions in 1994