X Window System user's guide : OSF/Motif edition | Search for a title, author or keyword | ||||||||
X Window System user's guide : OSF/Motif edition X Window System user's guide, OSF ( Open Software Foundation ) / Motif edition, by Valerie Quercia and Tim O'Reilly. Published 1991. The X Window System, called X for short, is a network-based graphics window system that was developed at MIT ( Massachusetts Institute of Technology ) in 1984. Unlike most earlier display protocols, X was specifically designed to be used over network connections rather than on an integral or attached display device. X is typically run on a workstation with a large screen ( although it also runs on PCs and special X terminals, as well as on many larger systems ). A note about the X display:, in X, the terms display and screen are not equivalent. A display may consist of more than one screen. This feature might be implemented in several ways. There might be two physical monitors, linked to form a single display. Alternatively, two screens might be defined as different ways of using the same physical monitor. For example, on the Sun-3/60 color workstation, screen 0 is color, and screen 1 is black and white. In this manual, we'll take a look at a typical X display and consider some general system features. We'll also briefly compare a standard X application ( written with the X Toolkit ) to a Motif application ( written with the Motif Toolkit, designed to correspond closely with the then-familiar Microsoft Windows interface ). We'll also introduce some of the more important prograrms included in the standard distribution of X, and the mwm ( Motif Window Manager ) window manager shipped with OSF/Motif. Most window systems are kernel-based: that is, they are closely tied to the operating system itself and can only run on a discrete system, such as a single workstation. The X Window System is not part of any operating system but instead is composed entirely of user-level programs. The architecture of the X Window System is based on what is known as a client-server model. The system is divided into two distinct parts: display servers that provide display capabilities and keep track of user input and clients, application programs that perform specific tasks. In a sense, the server acts as intermediary between client application programs, and the local display hardware ( one or perhaps muldple screens ) and input devices ( generally a keyboard and pointer ). When you enter input using the keyboard or a pointing device, the server conveys the input to the relevant client application. Likewise, the client programs make requests ( for information, process, etc. ) that are communicated to the hardware display by the server. For example, a client may request that a window be moved or that text be displayed in the window. This division within the X architecture allows the clients and the display server either to work together on the same machine or to reside on different machines ( possibly of different types, with different operating systems, etc.) that are connected by a network. For example, you might use a relatively low-powered PC or workstation as a display server to interact with clients that are running on a more powerful remote system. Even though the client program is actually running on the more powerful system, all user input and displayed output occur on the PC or workstation server and are communicated across the network using the X protocol. XFree86, the freely redistributable open-source implementation of the X Window System, runs primarily on UNIX® and UNIX-like operating systems like Linux, all of the BSD variants, Sun Solaris both native 32 and 64 bit support, Solaris x86, Mac OS X ( via Darwin ) as well as other platforms like OS/2 and Cygwin ( Windows ).
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