Accelerated-X
More info
- Creator
- Xi Graphics
- Type
- X server
- License
- Proprietary
Xi Graphics' commercial X server for Linux and other PC Unixes, which through the 1990s sold drivers for graphics cards and laptops that XFree86 could not yet handle.
Thomas Roell, author of X386, founded Xi Graphics in Denver in the mid-1990s and carried the commercial branch on under the name Accelerated-X. It came in desktop, laptop and multi-head editions, cost on the order of a hundred dollars, and was bought by people whose graphics card XFree86 ran only in unaccelerated VGA mode or not at all. The laptop edition was for years the only way to get the native resolution on a Linux notebook, multi-head support arrived before Xinerama, and for a while the company also sold DeXtop, a CDE desktop for Linux.
The business model assumed the free server would lag, and it did for as long as the chip makers kept their specifications to themselves. When XFree86 4.0 gained a modular driver architecture in 2000 and ATI, Matrox and later Intel began releasing documentation or writing drivers themselves, the room shrank. Xi Graphics carried on with the Summit series into the 2000s, turned towards embedded systems, and faded out quietly. Its rival Metro-X went the same way, only faster.