Thanks.
Now for a more stupider question.
What is the purpose of them exactly. I have read the sites but being alien
to the unix world it confuses me.
Do they just make unix a windows type enviroment ?
Is KDE/GNOME the same or they like themes to X windows. ?
So confused. but am trying to get away from microsoft.
thanks
mark
Ok, _trying_ to leave some things out of this, like the fact that X-Windows was available long _before_ Windoze... ;-)
Sort of. X/XFree is basically a minimal graphical user interface with built in networking support. It provides the bare essentials and infrastructure to build a 'window manager' on top of. Window Managers like CDE, TWM, WindowMaker, IceWM, and others all 'sit on top of' X, adding their own widget libraries(think icons, dialog boxes, 'styles') and defining behaviors (focus follows mouse, click to focus, hot key/meta key support/keybindings).
In an X environment, because of having builtin networking from the start, it's fairly common to be running an application on one system, and displaying it on another. The X Server is required on any system that you want to actually display applications on your screen. These applications can be running on the same system (which is what all non networked systems do), or from another system. One of the nice features of X is the underlying architecture is standard across ALL flavors of *nix- it's not perfect, but on a *bsd or Linux system, you can have Solaris's admintool or smc running from a Sun box alongside OpenOffice running locally.
Theres a lot more to X, and arguably a lot of features that X 'may not need' any longer, and others that have become security risks as hacking and script kiddies have become more frequent. A search for 'X Windows FAQ' should turn up something.
Back to your question- KDE and GNOME both sit on top of X, like any/all X Window Managers. KDE and GNOME both go a step 'further' and also provide session and desktop management. A 'pure' Window Manager is generally only conccerned with the basics- handling window actions and providing for basic window operations- title bars, window decorations (buttons and menus), and the like. KDE and GNOME actually include Window Managers of their own (KDE and Sawfish respectively), but add on additional functionality as well, including some fairly detailed specifications of what an application should/''must' do to be fully KDE or GNOME compliant.
Hope that helps somewhat...
Scott
----- Original Message ----- From: "Payne" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "M.D. DeWar" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "freebsd-questions"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2003 5:11 PM
Subject: Re: X11 and Xfree86
X11r6 is the version of xfree86."[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
Payne
M.D. DeWar wrote:
What is the difference between x11r6 and xfree86 ? I went to xfree site and ended up at x.org and the d/l are not the same.
thanks newbie mark
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