Windows 2003 server web - Inside Linux Chapter 4. Installing X Windows Many
Inside Linux Chapter 4. Installing X Windows Many people expect their operating systems to provide a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to the underlying system. Considering the power of computers today, there is no reason to use a command- line interface. The Macintosh popularized the GUI and showed that computer illiterate people can actually be productive using a computer. The magic behind this productivity is the GUI environment layered on top of the operating system. In the UNIX world, the X Windows System is the graphical environment of choice. Developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), X can be found on virtually every UNIX system to date. Linux is no exception. Linux uses a version of X named XFree86. XFree86 is a freely available implementation of X Windows for Linux, System V/386, 386BSD, and other PC UNIX systems. The network product is known as X11. This allows an application on one machine to display to another machine. In this chapter, we see what it takes to install and configure XFree86. Configuring X can be a breeze or a nightmare. The hardware of the machine and the version of Linux and XFree86 determine whether it is hard or easy. By far, I highly recommend that you obtain the most current release of Linux and XFree86. The newer releases are more powerful, flexible, and most important - stable. You will be at an advantage if you know some basic Linux commands. If you have read Chapter 3, “Using Linux,” you are equipped with the basic commands required. Installing and configuring X will require that you edit various text files. Any simple text editor will do. XFree86 is available in two releases: v2.x and v3.x. Because significant defects are present in v2.0, I recommend that you not use it. The time and effort you expend may not be reflected at runtime. In addition, don’t even consider any version prior to 2.0. Trying to get any version from 2.0 and earlier will be frustrating and difficult. XFree86 Defined XFree86 is a powerful windowing environment for Linux and other PC-oriented UNIX systems. The X Windows System, a GUI designed for UNIX, was developed at MIT. The first X Windows release, X11R1, was available in 1987. A group of developers (David Wexelblat headed the team) formed the XFree86 Team in 1992 to develop XFree86, a freely redistributable implementation of the X Windows system. Consequently, the XFree86 Project was founded in 1994 and had two purposes. First was to continue research and development of XFree86 for the public. The second purpose was to obtain membership in the X Consortium. The X Consortium is an organization that was formed to define and create a standardized UNIX windowing environment. MIT and IBM, among other organizations, are working members of the X Consortium. The XFree86 Project, as a member of the X Consortium, was allowed free reign to information on upcoming releases of X. This gave them an advantage because they had release information before the public. The most current version of XFree86 to date is release 3.3.3.1, which is based on X Windows Release 6 (X11R6.4). At the time of this writing, most commercial distributions of Linux are shipping with the 3.3.3 release. The June 1999 Slackware 4.0 release contains version 3.3.3.1 of XFree86. X consists of a number of components, all working together to produce the graphical environment. At the top of the heap is the window manager. The window manager controls the appearance of windows and their widgets, such as buttons, menus, and scrollbars. Another important component is the X Network Protocol (XNP) ; it provides the protocol for network communications. Tied closely to XNP is Xlib , which is a function library that implements XNP. The core window system provides the core services required by the other components. page 61
Note: In case you are looking for affordable webhost to host and run your servlet application check Vision servlet hosting services