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X Window System User’s Guide In this page, you will find three excellent manuals: X Window System User’s Guide, OPEN LOOK Edition ( by Ian Darwin, Valerie Quercia and Tim O’Reilly, 1995 ); XView Programming Manual ( by Dan Heller, updated for XView Version 3.2 by Thomas Van Raalte, 1991 - 1993 ); XView Reference Manual ( by Dan Heller, 1991 ). The OPEN LOOK GUI is a popular user interface style ( also called a graphical user interface, or GUI ) for programs running on window systems like The X Window System. X11 itself is a network-based graphics windowing system developed at MIT ( Massachusetts Institute of Technology ) and widely adopted as an industry standard. But X11 only provides the foundation and skeleton of a window system, just as concrete and wood provide the foundation and framework for a house. The OPEN LOOK GUI was designed by Sun and AT&T with help from Xerox, and is based in part, like other X11 GUIs such as OSF/Motif, and other window systems such as the Apple Macintosh, on pioneering work done in the late 1960’s and 1970’s at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center ( PARC ) and other research sites. OPEN LOOK has also been influenced by a family resemblance to SunView, Sun’s earlier, very successful, and long-popular workstation window system. XView ( X Window-System-based Visual/Integrated Environment for Workstations ) is a user-interface toolkit to support interactive, graphics-based applications running under the X Window System. This toolkit, developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc., is derived from earlier toolkits for the SunView windowing system. With over 2000 SunView applications in the workstation market, there are many programmers already familiar with the SunView application programmer’s interface ( API ). 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.
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