>How do you configure small things liek the screen saver name, and when it
>comes on in X? What else can one configure besides vidtune?
You can configure literally *everything* in X. First, some basics:
X clients are programs that make requests to the X server, the program
that actually controls the screen. Typical examples of X clients
include xterm, xv, netscape etc. There is also one special client
that runs on each server called a window manager (actually, there
doesn't *have* to be a window manager, but without one, X is very
limited!).
Configuring the X server itself is the first step. If you have a
working X, you've probably done this already. If you're using
XFree86, my advice is to use XF86Setup, which provides a simple
GUI configuration tool (better, IMHO, than RedHat's Xconfigurator
for example, although you may need to obtain it separately). This
will let you set the approriate monitor refresh rates, video card,
and input devices for your system. You may need to manually edit
the resulting file to set the default bit depth. You can then tweak
screen positioning and size with xvidtune. Further tweaking can be
done using xset(1). Adding appropriate xset commands to your global
or personal xinitrc (or xsession if you're using xdm) will let you
set things like the font path, mouse acceleration, screen blanking
and so on.
Each X client creates a window, and controls its contents. The
window manager adds some decoration to that window (e.g., a title
bar, borders, minimize and maximize buttons etc.).
If you want to change the way window borders etc. look and feel,
you need to configure your window manager. If you want to change
how the application itself looks and feels (e.g., which fonts to
use, what colour you want the background and so on), you need to
configure the X client in question, i.e., the application.
Applications are typically configured using the X resource database.
This is just a database of settings for various programs. It is read
when the X server starts, and depending on the application, can
control virtually everything about that app. The appropriate values
are set via a simple text file. For example, I have the following
settings for xterm:
!!!
!!! XTerm
!!!
XTerm*background: gray18
XTerm*foreground: MediumSeaGreen
XTerm*cursorColor: MediumSeaGreen
XTerm*font: fixed
XTerm*saveLines: 1024
XTerm*scrollBar: true
This says that any new xterm should be created with a dark grey
background, with a green foreground and cursor (I'm nostalgic
about the good old days of VT100s, OK? :-), that it should use
the "fixed" font, that I always want a scrollbar, and that it
should save 1024 lines of history through which to scroll back.
Some window managers (e.g. mwm) are also configured using the
X resource database, but these days, most are done through a
config file (e.g., fvwm and it's derivatives). Read the manual
for details of the config file format. Most are pretty intuitive
(at least to me :-).
System wide X resources are typically held in the directory
/usr/X11/lib/X11/app-defaults, one for each application
(although each application comes with defaults compiled in
as well).
You can override these with your own personal resources,
usually held in either ~/.Xdefaults or ~/.Xresources. The
two have a slightly different format, in that personal ones
need to be prefixed with the application name with the
first letter capitalized, or the first two letters in the
case where the first letter is an "x" (a generalization,
but good enough for now). E.g.,
*foreground: MediumSeaGreen
in /usr/X11/lib/X11/app-defaults/XTerm becomes
XTerm*foreground: MediumSeaGreen
in ~/.Xdefaults.
If you make changes to ~/.Xdefaults, you need to reload the
database with:
xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults
before the changes will take effect. The resources available
for each application are typically listed in its manual page,
in a "resources" section. See xterm(1) for an example of this.
As a brief guide to configuring X:
- Configure your X server.
- Choose a window manager that suits your needs (by default,
you'll probably have fvwm, which is good enough for most).
- Configure your chosen window manager to look and feel the
way you want.
- Set up your resource database to customize your apps
according to your personal tastes.
Files to look for:
/usr/X11/lib/X11/xinit/*
/usr/X11/lib/X11/xdm/*
/etc/X11/XF86Config
/usr/X11/lib/X11/app-defaults
~/.Xdefaults
/etc/X11/fvwm/system.fvwmrc
Window managers:
Fvwm: http://www.hpc.uh.edu/fvwm/
Fvwm95: http://www.terraware.net/ftp/pub/Mirrors/FVWM95/fvwm95.html
AfterStep: http://www.afterstep.org
WindowMaker: http://www.windowmaker.org
Enlightenment: http://www.rasterman.com
Blackbox: http://linux.wiw.org/blackbox/
Icewm: http://ixtas.fri.uni-lj.si/~markom/icewm/
Amiwm: http://www.lysator.liu.se/~marcus/amiwm.html
Mlvwm: http://www.bioele.nuee.nagoya-u.ac.jp/member/tak/mlvwm.html
Qvwm: http://www-masuda.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~kourai/qvwm/qvwm-e.html
There are numerous others, but those are some of the more popular ones.
For more, take a look at http://www.plig.org/xwinman/.
Desktops:
GNOME: http://www.gnome.org
KDE: http://www.kde.org
Anyway, hope that explains some of what you can do in the way of
configuring X. At the end of the day, there's no substitute for
documentation, so I advise reading the man pages for your window
manager and applications.
Tet
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