Metro-X
More info
- Creator
- Metro Link
- Type
- X server
- License
- Proprietary
Metro Link's commercial X server for Linux, bundled in Red Hat's boxed sets in the 1990s, whose module loader lives on in X.Org.
Metro Link of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, sold Unix software into the PC world from the early 1990s: the Metro-X server, a Motif port called Metro Motif, and later Metro OpenGL. Metro-X competed with Xi Graphics' Accelerated-X for the same customers – those whose graphics cards XFree86 could not drive – and won the distributors: Red Hat put a licence in its boxed releases for several years. Configuration was done in a graphical tool rather than by typing sync frequencies into XF86Config, which for many was the whole reason to buy.
The lasting contribution came out of the collaboration with XFree86. Metro Link wrote the dynamic module loader that turned XFree86 4.0 in 2000 into a single server binary with loadable drivers, instead of one server per card family, and that architecture is still X.Org's. It was also the end of the business: once the free server could load the vendors' own modules there was nothing left to sell, and Metro Link closed down around 2002. Metro Motif was for years the Motif most Linux users had actually paid for, until Open Motif was released free for open-source platforms in 2000.