X11 and Xfree86
Erik Steffl
steffl at bigfoot.com
Tue Oct 28 14:53:56 PST 2003
M.D. DeWar wrote:
> Thanks.
> Now for a more stupider question.
> What is the purpose of them exactly. I have read the sites but being alien
> to the unix world it confuses me.
> Do they just make unix a windows type enviroment ?
X Windows System is a windowing system, but not complete GUI
solution, it provides grpahic services (transparently over the network).
Using X a program can display windows, lines, bitmaps ansd other
graphical primitives. But there is no way to manipulate windows, no
decorations (widnows do not have borders, title etc.), no buttons, combo
boxes, menus etc. (called widgets in X world).
generally on top of X you have:
widget libraries: there is number of them, these are various buttons,
menus, combo boxes etc. the common ones are motif (or free
implementation lesstif), athena, qt (used by kde), gnome has its own
widgets etc... there is a large number of widgets libraries and this is
a source of constant criticism (they all look and behave differently and
make user experience inconsistent, which might or might not be a problem:-)
window manager: makes it possible to manage windows, it is
responsible for windows decorations (borders, titlebar, titlebar
buttons), it provides ways to move and otherwise manipulate windows,
usually has some kind of menu/program launcher etc.
> Is KDE/GNOME the same or they like themes to X windows. ?
kde and gnome are one layer up, they try to provide complete desktop
- in addition to what window manager provide they provide - means for
apps to communicate, common look (themes), drag and drop, task bar, main
menu (kinda like start menu in win), common way to configure desktop
etc. They are kinda like window manager on steroids (there are other
ones as well, CDE, nextstep/gnustep etc.)
> So confused. but am trying to get away from microsoft.
good luck,
fun experiment (to see what X really is:-) - try to run X from text
console (just like that, not xdm, not startx) - you should get pretty
much empty screen with mouse cursor - that's plain X. Now you can go
back to text console (hit ctrl-z, run bg to run X in background,
alternatively just go to another free text console) and run xterm
-display :1 (or :0, depends on whether you already run X) and go back to
your X (alt-ctrl-Fn where Fn is one of the function keys on top of
keyboard). You should see xterminal, but plain window - no borders etc.
you can write in this terminal but you cannot move it... next step is to
run window manager (e.g. twm, it's usually installed by default, or any
window manager you like) - you can run it from xterm that you just opened.
erik
More information about the freebsd-questions
mailing list