The XDarwin Project has announced an upcoming hardware-accelerated version (4.3) of XDarwin, the X11 server for Mac OS X. The update will purportedly contain significant font integration functionality with Mac OS X 10.2 (“Jaguar”).
XDarwin is network-transparent, so it’s easy to use with Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and other Unix environments. With XDarwin it’s possible to configure software to run on other computers, running various operating systems across the network, but to display their results in real-time on Mac OS X. The XDarwin package provides a client/server windowing infrastructure and adheres to the XFree86 standardized application programming interfaces (APIs).
According to Scott Luhan of the XDarwin Project, XDarwin 4.3 will include hardware accelerated GLX in rootless mode; the ability to use all native Mac OS X fonts; a new “configure X server” option; faster 2D drawing in rootless mode; faster full screen mode 2D drawing, comparable to rootless mode; and a new font configuration library (fontconfig).
A pre-release version 4.2.99.901 is available immediately for testing by advanced users and beta testers. But remember: it is beta (unfinished software). Discounted pre-orders are now being taken for the final release of XDarwin 4.3.