Section 10.7. Client Applications

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10.7. Client Applications

Every program that writes to the screen of an X server is known as an X client. Many useful X clients are included with the X Window System. Many other useful clients have been developed specifically for GNOME and KDE, but they require their expected DE in order to function properly and vary between Linux distributions. To give you a flavor of X clients, we'll stick with generic clients that are common to all desktop environments.

Here are a few of the simplest X clients that beginners tend to use first to learn the X Window System. You should consult the man page for each program to find out about optional arguments that can be used to customize the client program.

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10.7.1. xclock

Figure 10-9 describes the xclock command, and Figure 10-10 shows an xclock client.

Utility: xclock [-digital]

The xclock command provides a simple clock on your desktop. The default is an analog clock. If the -digital argument is specified, a digital clock is displayed instead.

The xclock command can be started by hand or in your initialization file.

Figure 10-10. An xclock client.

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10.7.2. xterm

The xterm is probably the most commonly used X client among Linux users. It provides a terminal interface window to the system (Figure 10-11). Early windowing system users used their X terminals mostly to provide multiple terminal interfaces into the system to consolidate monitors on their desktop. As X clients become more sophisticated, xterm is used less and less, but it is still quite useful if you use the Linux shell interface. We saw an example of an xterm earlier in this chapter. The xterm has a myriad of arguments allowing the window's size, color, and font to be defined at the command line. See the man page for xterm for details.

Utility: xterm

The xterm command starts a terminal window on the desktop.