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Change History: MI/X 4.2 for Windows

Updates - 5 November 2004

• Fixed crash when using default window manager in rootless mode if a client changed the window title more than once using a UTF-8 encoded string.
• Fixed problem resizing windows with the _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_UTILITY property when using default window manager in rootless mode.

Updates - 7 October 2004

• Fixed a problem that caused MI/X to incorrectly report that your trial period had expired even if you'd never run it before.
• Fixed a problem while moving or resizing windows in rootless mode.

Updates - 4 October 2004

• Fixed the default window manager used in X-Desktop (fullscreen) mode if XDM is not also being used.
• Modified key map to not confuse dtterm into thinking that the "c" key was really "Break".
• Modified XQueryColor to not return an error if the "unused" bits of a pixel were not zero - just ignore them. Some Gnome and KDE programs thought this was a fatal error and would just exit.
• Uninstalling will now leave your license file installed so that if you uninstall and reinstall you won't have to reenter your authorization code. Also, installing and update on top of an existing install won't overwrite your license file.

Updates - 13 September 2004

• Updated to latest XFree86 code base
• Updated fonts
• Improved keyboard support for non-English keyboard layouts
• Many fixes to rootless mode window management

Updates - 9 December 2003

• Fixed a problem with the numeric keypad not working with Italian (and possibly other) keyboard layouts.
• XDM Broadcast now presents a list of hosts willing to serve for you to select from.
• The installer now says 4.1 instead of 4.0

Updates - 5 November 2003

Updates - 30 October 2003

Updates - 12 September 2003

• When MI/X gets an error loading a font, it tells you what font it failed to load (this is not a new feature). There is now a toggle on the Options tab of the preferences dialog for this feature so you can turn it off (this is the new feature).
• Reworked the Options tab of the preferences dialog. Options are now divided into several groups with headers. Options that can take effect right away no longer require you to restart MI/X.
• Added an option for "KDE3 compatibility." There were some changes we had to make a while back for icons to show up in KDE3 (see FAQ 7.8). It turns out that the newest vesion of KDE not only works without those patches, but it won't work with them. (see FAQ 7.10 and 7.11).
• Fixed a memory leak in the clipboard code.
• Known problem: The installer still says it's MI/X 4.0 instead of 4.1.

Updates - 6 August 2003

Updates - 25 July 2003

• Fixed a TCP/IP communication problem which would make some clients stop responding after a while.
• Added the SECURITY, XC-APPGROUP extensions. SECURITY is off by default until we verify that it actually works and that activating it doesn't break anything.
• Added the XINERAMA extension. This extension allows clients to detect if you have multiple monitors and determine their geometries. It will not show up if you only have one monitor, since it would be meaningless in that case.
• The Frame Buffer (FB) rendering code and the RENDER extension are almost supported in rootless mode. There are still a few problems to be worked out, mostly having to do with how pixmaps are tiled when filling. It also flickers a bit more than it should.

Updates - 18 June 2003

• Fixed a cosmetic error in the preferences dialog which crept in with the last revision.
• Now caches TrueType font information in HKEY_CURRENT_USER in the registry instead of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. This was causing problems if MI/X was installed by an administrator but the first person to run it wasn't.

Updates - 29 May 2003

• Fixed a problem which caused some machine IDs to have a spurious quote in the middle. This caused the online purchase form to complain that the machine ID was invalid. In 8-bit pseudo-color mode, MI/X will no longer "steal" 20 colormap entries. We used to do this to ensure that Windows had a few colors to work with, but at least one X client refused to work if it couldn't access all 256 colors.
• Added an option to allow the Windows display driver to do ICM color matching. This assumes that you've assigned an ICM profile to the display in Windows. With this option on, MI/X assumes all colors will be sRGB and lets Windows color matching sytem convert them to device colors. With it off, no color matching is done. This feature is still experimental.

Updates - 24 April 2003

• Fixed a crash if more than 18 clients connected at once.

Updates - 8 April 2003

• Fix for KDE crashing!
• Fix for KDE icons not showing up. If they had any transparency in them at all, they were 100% transparent.

Updates - 31 March 2003

• May have fixed the problem of crashing with KDE. Once we got a machine setup with RedHat 8 and KDE, it worked. This means that either something we did earlier fixed the problem or we just haven't reproduced the conditions that make it crash.
• The RENDER extension and use of the newer Frame Buffer (FB) code are now separate options in the preferences dialog. Note that the RENDER extension requires the FB option to be enabled. If FB is disabled the RENDER option is ignored.
• The automatic PRIMARY selection to Windows clipboard mode is done. There is an option in the preferences dialog to turn this feature on and off
• Added support for additional font directories. If you copy a font directory from another Unix machine, you can just place it in the c:\Program Files\MicroImages\MIX_4_0\bdf directory, and MI/X will try to add it to the font path automatically.
• Small cosmetic change: The splash screen now stays up for 3 seconds and then goes away. It used to stay up until the server initialization was done, which took a while. These days, computers are so fast that it was just flicker.

Updates - 19 March 2003

• Added an option to force the stacking order so that windows with a TRANSIENT_FOR hint are always above their parent window in rootless mode.
• Fixed a problem which only happened if you have two ethernet adaptors, one of which is wireless and doesn't keep the same NIC/MAC address.

Updates - 14 March 2003

• Fixed a crash which only happened under NT 4.0.
• Slight redesign of the preferences dialog. The "Other" tab has been renamed to "Options" which is more descriptive. Some toggles which were separate are now in the main list of options.
• Started to implement an automatic PRIMARY selection to Windows clipboard mode. Currently only works one way: Windows clipboard to X Primary selection. X to Windows clipboard wasn't finished at the time this version was built.
• Updated the version of InstallShield we're using.

Updates - 5 March 2003

• Fixed a problem in which it was unable to find a dll that was right under its nose. Only reported by a few users. The final solution was to eliminate the need for the DLL.
• If you use XDM on a PC with multiple IP addresses, it will tell the XDM server to connect to the address on which MI/X is listening for connections instead of just the first IP address on the machine.

Updates - 26 February 2003

• No longer ignores port setting if you have "Listen on all addresses" selected. Before, it would ignore the preference and use port 6000
• Fixed a problem which caused it to reject some authorization codes as "invalid".
• Running the 4.0 demo no longer causes a perfectly good 3.0 license become invalid. See the FAQ for instructions for how to fix your 3.0 license it 4.0 demo broke it.
• Note: We're having trouble convincing InstallShield that this is really an update. If you have an earlier 4.0 installed, it won't override it, so you must uninstall any previous 4.0 before installing this patch.
• Minor: Changed the version numbering back to the way it was for 3.0

Updates - 25 February 2003

• Fixed a problem which caused running the 4.0 demo to make valid 3.0 licences think they were an expired demo.
• Fixed AltGr sequences on Sweedish keyboards (and possibly some other languages which use them)

Updates - 19 February 2003

• Fixed a problem with Machine IDs. Sometimes a digit was being left out because it was zero.

New features in 4.00 - 11 February 2003

• Rootless (a.k.a. "Windows Desktop") mode. You can optionally choose a new Windows Desktop mode. In this mode your current Microsoft Windows desktop is exposed. Each X window will appear and behave similar to the other Microsoft Windows you have open on your desktop.
• OpenGL is now supported. OpenGL is now built into the X Server for direct use in your X client programs which can make use of it.
• The RENDER extension is now supported. This extension is used mainly to to support anti-aliased text in X clients. The RENDER extension was invented by Keith Packard.
• X Font servers are now supported. This allows a remote server to provide fonts not installed with MI/X. This is useful for remote systems like Solaris which use proprietarily fonts.
• Now X11R6.6 The core of MI/X 4.0 is based on XFree86 4.2.1.

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What was new in MI/X 3.0 for Windows

Feature Highlights

• Automatic support for TrueType fonts. Any TrueType font that Windows knows about is available through MI/X.
• Virtual desktop. In full screen mode, the desktop area can be set to larger than the actual screen. If you do this, the server window will have scroll bars and an optional workspace overview window.
• Cut and paste between the Windows clipboard.
• Will take advantage of MMX acceleration if your processor supports it.
• Mouse wheel support. Scrolling the mouse wheel sends mouse Button 4 (up) and Button 5 (down) events.
• Backing-store supported.

Updates - 10 September 2002

• Fixed problems with Alt-Gr sequences on some keyboard layouts.
• Solved problem in which Alt key up sequences could get lost.
• Included more fonts by default.

Updates - 10 January 2002

• Mouse wheel support added! Scrolling the mouse wheel now sends mouse Button 4 (up) and Button 5 (down) events.
• Backing-Store now works.
• All supported extensions now have an enable/disable toggle on the "Other" panel of the preferences dialog.
• Fixed a cosmetic problem which caused some background pixmaps to use the wrong origin. Mainly noticeable in gradient filled menus in KDE.

Updates - 29 November 2001

• A problem which causes MI/X to crash right away on NT 4.0 has been fixed.

Updates  - 24 October 2001

• A problem which caused authorization codes to appear invalid has been fixed! The problem was that the Host ID reported was sometimes a digit short.

Updates  - 18 October 2001

• Trying to solve a problem that only happens to some people but not on any of our machine here. This fix didn't work but gave us more information to help solve the problem.

Updates 6 - 11 October 2001

• The problem of MI/X exiting right away on startup has been solved! On startup MI/X tries to open and bind a socket for every IP address on the machine. If it gets an error on one of them, it closes the connection and ignores that address. The problem was that the code to close the connection noticed that there were no clients connected. If the option to exit after the last client disconnects was enabled, it assumed that the lack of clients meant they had all disconnected and it exited. This leads to another question: why was it failing to open the bind the socket in the first place?

Updates  - 28 September 2001

• Added a "Listen on all IP addresses for this machine" toggle to the Network tab of the Preferences dialog. This should help those with dynamic IP addresses.
• Selecting which IP address to listen on should be less confusing now.
• A lead into the problem of MI/X starting and exiting right away. If it runs across a TrueType font with "bad" hinting code, it may panic and exit. This version will still panic but gives an error message saying why. Note that we still haven't been able to make this happen here.
• Some cryptic error messages have been made more meaningful.
• May have fixed a problem creating license.dat file for demo which sometimes made MI/X appear to be expired the first time you ran it. If this didn't fix it, then at least the error it gives will be more meaningful and perhaps provide some insight into why this happens for some people.
• Setting font path to default with xset fp default no longer forgets about TrueType fonts.
• Fixed a problem that caused MI/X to crash with cursors bigger than 32 pixels high.
• Resets 15-day demo period. Because a number of people have run into problems with 3.0.3 that prevented them from using MI/X before their 15-day trial period expired.

Updates  - 13 August 2001

• Fixed a problem that prevented the F10 key from getting passed to client programs.
• If you have a Microsoft Natural keyboard, the buttons across the top (back, forward, stop, etc...) are now mapped to F13-F29. This may not be as useful as was hoped, as Windows detects some of the keys and pops up your browser, or plays the CD in the drive. These can be disabled with the utility that came with the keyboard if you really need function keys higher than F12. It's also only known to work with the Microsoft keyboard. Other keyboards may have some of the same buttons but they don't behave the same way.
• Network preferences now default to listening on all IP addresses. Previous default was to not listen for connections on any address. (This was to have been fixed in 3.0.2, but the fix didn't get into the release version somehow).

Updates  - 27 July 2001

• Was falsely detecting MMX on older Pentiums and 486s that didn't have it, resulting in crashes on older machines.
• Fixed a problem that caused a crash when trying to run Star Office and a couple other 3rd party applications.

Updates before July 2001

• The Network tab on the preferences dialog is now available even if you only have one IP address. It will also let you specify that you want to listen on the 127.0.0.1 address (loopback), which is necessary if you use SSH tunneling.
• Added toggles to the "Other" panel to disable some extensions. Specifically, the existence of the shared memory extension seems to confuse some X clients.
• Fixed crash trying to draw wide circles caused by bad compiler optimizations.
• Warn the user before setting up a floating license. Unless you really know what you're doing, setting a floating license ends the trial period.
• Added some MMX acceleration for PCs that have MMX

New features in 3.0

• Automatic support for TrueType fonts.
• Several built-in fallbacks for popular fonts. For example, if a client requests Helvetica and you don't have one, it will use Arial instead.
• Support for remote login via XDM.
• Now X11R6.4.
• Now works with Gnome and KDE.
• Now allows local clients such as cygwin.
• Server window size can now be set to larger than full screen. If you do this, the server window will have scroll bars to let you scroll the virtual screen.
• Virtual screen area with optional workspace overview window.
• New and improved preferences panel.
• Support for multi-homed (more than one IP address) systems. Lets you select which IP address (or addresses) to allow client connections from.
• Cut and paste between the Windows clipboard.
• Floating licenses can be served from Unix machines.
• Improved online help.
• Various optimizations to improve rendering speed.
• Fixes for some pixmap formats that were not handled correctly in 2.0.

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No Refunds.  MI/X for Windows is an inexpensive product with a free trial period.  Please test and verify that MI/X meets your requirements before making your purchase. MicroImages does not offer refunds on MI/X for Windows.
 

What was new in MI/X 2.0 for Windows

Easy setup

• Single file to download and simple installation.

• Uninstall available either from the Windows "Start" menu or from Add/Remove Programs on the Control Panel.

• Integrated "Preferences" dialog to control server settings. It is no longer necessary to edit the tntserv.ini file to change settings.

• Optionally displays IP address in title bar for use with dynamic IP assignment commonly used with dialup connections.

Compatible with more applications

• Improved support for 24-bit TrueColor visuals for compatibility with more applications.

• Now supports the shape extension used by many X applications.

Enhanced performance and reliability.

• Faster drawing using optimized rendering algorithms.

• Numerous minor corrections.

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