> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On > Behalf Of Jon Gabriel > Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2003 3:01 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: ATL: X-Windows > > > Does anyone know of a site that would explain exactly what > X-Windows is and > does? I'm coming up blank in my net searches. > > Am trying to figure out if I need to run it on my Mac G4. :)
You probably don't. Timely question, though... I spent part of today, when feeling better, installing an X server on my Windows 2K machine, which I'm using via SSH to the new server I'm configuring. And that server-to-server verbiage leads me directly to the fact that in the world of X, what we usually think of as a server is a client, and vice-versa. Back to that in a minute. X is a graphical user interface system, supporting several windowing systems (e.g. Gnome and KDE). Remember how John Sculley used to put down Windows as "just a GUI on top of DOS?" That's pretty much what X is, usually for Unix software. On the Mac, and to a large extent with Windows today, the windowing system is deeply integrated with the rest of the OS, so it can be difficult to comprehend it as a separate thing. But it helps if you understand a cool thing about X, which is that it allows the UI to be on a different machine than the operating system. Now that I have an X server on my Windows machine, I can open up any graphical application for my Linux box on my Windows machine. Right now, I can open an X window running Mozilla, here on my W2K machine. The UI is running on this machine, the W2K box, but the program is running on the Linux box. With a "thin" X server, this means that the heavy lifting is happening on some other machine; my local system is just drawing stuff. It's not remote viewing of the Linux screen, like with PC Anywhere, etc. The W2K machine becomes a "display" that the server knows about, where it can open windows, etc. And the Linux box doesn't care if the display is local (on the same machine) or across the world, connected by the Internet. Of course, if you're going to do this over a net, it's really a good idea to have a fast connection. I have 100 mbit Ethernet at home, so I notice no real difference. Depending on the application, running across a network can become somewhat gruesome if bandwidth becomes a bottleneck. So, what could you do with X on your Mac? I'm assuming you mean an X server. You could then run X-based programs (clients) on your machine. For example, you could, with proper authorization, run a copy of Mozilla on my Linux box, from your Mac box. A window would open up with a Linux-based copy of Mozilla running in it. For the most part, it wouldn't look and feel like a Mac application unless you happened to choose an X window manager that resembles the Mac. You'd be able to copy and paste between apps running on your Mac and the X stuff. I'll stop now. Ask what you want and I'll answer as well as I can, as my health allows. Nick _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
