matttproud.com (blog)

For the uninitiated, what are we looking at? Could it be the Moiré Error from Doom? Well, no. You are looking at (part of) the boot up screen for the X Window System, specifically the pattern it uses as the background of the root window. This pattern is technically called a stipple.

What you’re seeing is pretty important and came to symbolize a lot for me as a computer practitioner. Over time, I came to develop a relationship with it roughly as this:

Well, part of it is nostalgia, but the other part is practical. For a long time the X Window System had a reputation for being difficult to configure. In retrospect, I’m not 100% sure why it earned this reputation, because the configuration file format, which is plain text, has remained essentially the same since I started using Linux in the mid-1990s. On the other hand, the amount of hand-written input required for the configuration file has fallen gradually over time. This is where the critique lies: the amount of information that needed to be gathered. In the old days, it used to be that mouse, keyboard, video card, monitor, fonts, plugin+module data, etc. needed to be spelled out in detail in /etc/X11/XF86Config. If you were starting out with a bare configuration file (e.g., after a fresh install of a system), researching the necessary parameters for your hardware could be a real pain in the ass. In this era, I had dial-up Internet, and Google wasn’t a thing yet.

And this leads to to an interesting observation: you wouldn’t want to wing it with the configuration, because allegedly you could break your monitor with a bad Monitor setting. Here is an example Monitor setting found in an XF86Config file from Red Hat 5.0 (1997–8) vintage) to give you an idea of just the level of detail required for the monitor:

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