Overview

Already rated as the industry’s top PC X server, X-Win32 7.1 offers significant improvements.

We have added hardware acceleration support for 3-D OpenGL applications. An overhaul of the OpenGL code added 55 new OpenGL extensions. Test applications show frame rate improvements of 5X to 20X. High-level 3-D modeling applications like I-DEAS and Catia that failed before, now work well with X-Win32, including hardware accelerated graphics.

For regular operations and graphics processing, Version 7.1 got a nice performance boost from the improved compiler in Microsoft Visual Studio and a re-implementation of our 24-bit color depth support. These improvements also enabled X-Win32 to function properly again with GNUplot and Mentor Graphics IC design software.

Version 7.1 also represents a complete change in the way that StarNet performs software development and takes us to a new level of responsiveness to customer problems. Some of the changes to our software development process include:

Software Development Improvements

• Automatic Build System - Every change we make results in a ready-to-ship installer. Once a change has been tested, we can deliver the updated installer to customers immediately. This used to be a manual process that took two to three days. As a result, new builds were only done after a large number of changes had been made (i.e. every three to five weeks).
• Crash Handler - Our new crash handler allows customers to send in a crash report when a crash occurs.  Already one of the most stable PC X servers, we used the crash reports to fix virtually all known X-Win32 crash problems, thus vastly improving overall stability of the X server.
• BitKeeper - A new source control system that makes us much more productive and able to deliver minor updates to previously released versions.

These changes add a lot of value to the maintenance that most customers purchase with the software as minor bug fixes and feature requests are implemented almost instantly. Competitors take weeks or months to address even minor bugs.

In addition to changes to our software development process, we also focused on the following areas for improvement:

X-Win32 7.1 Improvements

• OpenGL - More applications are now supported, particularly in hardware-accelerated mode. The number of supported OpenGL extensions has gone from 6 to over 60.
• Clipboard - Improved stability of the clipboard support and fixed several non-functional cases for non-US locales.
• Installer - We have changed from an InstallScript-based installer to an MSI-based installer, a feature that customers have been requesting for years. We still provide a 'setup.exe' installer for end-users and small companies, but enterprise customers will also have access to our MSI files, with which they can easily perform push deployments to thousands of computers.
• Graphics - We have added support for depth 24 XYPixmaps, which were required for many advanced graphics design programs.

Conclusion: The Best Value in PC X Servers

X-Win32 Version 7.1 offers customers a highly capable, stable and fast PC X server, loaded with productivity-enhancing features such as the integrated SSH connect option, yet our user interface has remained very simple so even the most novice user quickly becomes productive on a remote Unix or Linux server.

At a very reasonable per-user cost of $50-$225 (thanks to our concurrent licensing system), X-Win32 offers by far the best value in the PC X server market.