Introduction

The X Window system is Linux's Graphical User Interface (GUI).

These days most of the commercial Linux distributions will do a good bit of the work of configuring the X system for you. However, in order for things to run smoothly, you will need the following information:

Horizontal Synchronization Rate of your monitor

Vertical Refresh Rate of your monitor

Chipset and Memory size of your video card

The SuperProbe program may or may not be able to automatically detect some of this information for you. There was a time when you could count on that information being included in the documentation that came with your machine. These days you're probably going to have to go to your manufacturer's Web site. Encouragingly, however, I have noted that many manufacturers are starting to provide Linux-specific documentation.

Having installed X successfully, you may wish to run xvidtune to tweak your video settings.

X purists will probably want to configure xdm, the X Display Manager. This program can be used in place of the init-getty-login triptych familiar to the text-based Linux world to control access to your machine.

The X Window system allows you to specify a window manager (e.g., fvwm, WindowMaker) which will be your gateway to the system.

To decorate your desktop, get a new theme. Themes are wallpaper+window graphics files that are designed to be easy on the eyes (e.g., movies, celebrities, neat graphical hacks ). A vast assortment of nice themes are freely available from

www.themes.org

Please note that most of the commands in this section are GUI and interactive, so the examples provided may not be very informative. Fortunately, the programs, once invoked, are more or less self-explanatory.

The way to shut down an X session gracefully is with the key combination:

To copy text from one X Window to another

1. Open an edit session (vi, emacs) in the target window.

2. Highlight the text you want to copy.

3. Left click, then right click, in the target window.

You can run X windows programs remotely. To do so,

1. The machine on which you wish the output to show up must be running some sort of X client software.

2. The environment variable DISPLAY on the server machine must be set to the IP address of the remote console.

For example, say you are sitting at a machine whose IP is 192.168.100.12 and want to use xdvi to read the document example.dvi on the machine distant-srvr. First, telnet (or rlogin, or whatever) into distant-srvr. Then, from the command line, change the DISPLAY environment variable to your local console:

export DISPLAY=192.168.100.12:0.0

At this point any X application you start on distant-srvr will send its output across the network to your local console for example,

xdvi example.dvi &

The commands in this section include the following:

`XF86Setup`	Configure X Window system
`X`	X Window display server
`startx`	Front-end script for xinit
`xdm`	X Display Manager; can handle login
`xf86config`	Configure X Window system
`xinit`	Start X Window system
`xmseconfig`	Configure mouse
`xterm`	Start an X-Window
`xvidtune`	Tweak video display parameters