Introduction to X11


The X11 system is a suite of programs developed at MIT and in the open-source community over the past two decades. Its current implementation, developed and endorsed by the X.org Foundation, is known as Xorg. As discussed during the coverage of its installation in Chapter 2, "Installing FreeBSD," X11 has a client/server architectural model that lends itself well to clustered workstation configurations, but it can also work well on a single-user desktop computer as long as you understand the reasoning behind its seemingly curious designnamely, why the separation between the X Server (the windowing system's heavy-lifting core) and the window manager exists.

Like early versions of Microsoft Windows, X11 is a graphical "shell" that runs on top of the command-line operating system core; you first log in to the command-line environment and then you start up to go into the mouse-driven graphical mode where you can run applications such as web browsers and word processors. When you quit X11, you are returned to the command-line shell prompt.

X11 itself is a very rudimentary structure. All X11 does is put the computer's interface in "graphics mode" (rather than the textual interface of the usual console screen), running programs in separate windows that can be painted at different positions on the screen. However, X11 running without a window manager shows only bare, unadorned, unlabeled, immovable, non-resizable program windows. X11 itself provides no menus, no utilities, and not even a mechanism for moving windows around. For that, you need a window manager and other extra tools, all of which run within X11 and handle the tasks you normally think of as being intrinsic to a windowing desktop environment.

Some popular window managers include FVWM, Window Maker, AfterStep, and XFce; these window managers each have their own look and feel, and some are very carefully designed to mimic the appearance and behavior of Microsoft Windows, Sun's CDE, NeXTSTEP, or other popular user environments that have driven various operating systems over the years. More complex and polished user environments, better suited to heavy desktop use than plain window managers, include KDE and GNOME. You can install different window managers from the packages or ports, in /usr/ports/x11-wm (see Chapter 16, "Installing Additional Software," for more information on using the ports).

Assuming that you configured X11 during the installation (which was covered in the "Setting Up the X Window System (X11)" section of Chapter 2) or afterward, you should now be able to type startx at the command line to launch the X11 system.




FreeBSD 6 Unleashed
FreeBSD 6 Unleashed
ISBN: 0672328755
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 355
Authors: Brian Tiemann

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net