X Display Manager


Now that we have touched on the window manager and X server, the display manager is the next logical stop. When troubleshooting the X server, first make sure that the X server even starts. After that has been accomplished, set out to make the desktop usable by enabling a display manager. There are a lot of display managers out there. Although today most distributions default to the K-Desktop Manager or Sawfish, others are available such as fvwm, twm, xdm, and WindowMaker. As mentioned before, these are still X clients, which tell the X server how to paint the screen.

There are several ways to get display managers. If no other desktop managers are installed, the X server itself comes with several ways to get both the window manager and X server started. Commands such as startx and xinit are the most commonly used, followed by xdm. startx is really a front-end to xinit, which has been around since the beginning of X and is found on almost all X server implementations. It uses a configuration file in the user's $HOME directory, which indicates what to start. Because xinit and startx only initialize the server, the configuration file specifies how many terminals to open, along with the window manager to use, normally twm. Although most people use the default, as with everything else in UNIX/Linux, it has a configuration file.

For xinit or startx to initialize the X server along with a couple xterms, an xclock, and the twm window manager, as shown in Figure 15-3, the user's $home/.xinitrc would look like the following:

# cat .xinitrc xsetroot -solid gray & xterm & xterm & xclock & twm


Display managers offer a wide range of features for controlling the desktop. One main feature is X Display Manager Control Protocol, which enables you to use the local X server to display everything from a remote machine. This protocol normally is used with dumb terminals, which "leech" off a more powerful machine. For example, a dumb terminal would have the local video hardware and initialize a local X server, but the terminal normally would not have local resources such as a hard drive or processor. In this case, it would use XDMCP to get the desktop environment from another machine and display it on the local screen. Therefore, when the user is compiling code or doing work, he or she is using the resources of the remote machine. This also can be accomplished with the X -query command. This feature requires some configuration depending on the display manager used the situation with network firewalls. The firewalls must not block the TCP and UDP ports needed for the transmissions. A great resource on configuring the XDMCP protocol can be found in the XDMCP-HOWTO at www.tldp.org.



Linux Troubleshooting for System Administrators and Power Users
Real World Mac Maintenance and Backups
ISBN: 131855158
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 129
Authors: Joe Kissell

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