Accelerated-X
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Accelerated-X is a port of the X Window System to Intel x86 machines. It is fully compliant with industry standards for the X Window System that is used on UNIX systems, including Linux.
The Accelerated-X server is built on top of the X386 X server that was created by Thomas Roell for X11 Release 5. He founded a company in Colorado named Xi Graphics which still provides the Accelerated-X server.
The XFree86 project was intentionally created as a free alternative to the Accelerated-X server.
A particularly notable feature of the Accelerated-X server is that it supports "overlay mode" on several graphics cards which basically means that old UNIX-programs that are tailored to 256 fixed colors (8-bit PseudoColor) can run in parallel with modern applications using 24-bit TrueColor.
[edit] Desktop PCs
Many desktops come with an Add-In board with graphics chips from ATI, NVIDIA, etc. While some desktops have a graphics chip embedded on the motherboard, such as an Intel chip. Accelerated-X has been used as an upgrade to the performance of the Linux graphics drivers shipped with the Linux distribution pre-installed on the box, or to replace MS Windows graphics drivers when MS is replaced with Linux or Solaris.
[edit] Laptops/Notebooks
Accelerated-X graphics has been used as an upgrade to the performance of the Linux graphics drivers of laptops/ notebooks which were not properly supported by free Linux drivers, or by graphics drivers available from Sun Microsystems for 32-bit Intel based laptops.
