Kent West wrote:
Joe wrote:
Hi Kent I do not mean to bother you but I am confused. If I have X
running
it shows a GNOME desktop. Is this correct? X is the underlying
"server" and
GNOME is what I see? I was under the impression that X is a Desktop
such as
KDE or GNOME.
The X "server" is the underlying "graphical system"; it's generic in
that you can have all sorts of "clients" running on top of it.
Clients such as Gnome, KDE, wmaker, icewm, fluxbox, xterm, firefox,
konqueror, etc run on top of X.
Some clients, such as xterm and firefox, if run as the only clients on
top of X, would appear to be all there is to the computer.
Other clients, called window managers, add such things as title bars
and the maximize/minimize buttons to the clients such as xterm and
firefox.
You can have a "desktop environment", such as Gnome or KDE, that
includes both the window manager and a collection of clients that work
well together. In the case of KDE (I'm not that familiar with Gnome),
KDE is composed of the window manager "kwm" and a host of other
clients such as the file manager / web browser client called
"konqueror" and the game ktux and the KDE Control Panel, etc etc etc,
all running on top of X.
It's possible to run X by itself without having any clients running;
in such as case, all you'll see is a grayish hatched background with a
mouse pointer. If you were then to start an xterm on top of that
instance of X, you'd see a terminal window on top of the grayish
hatched background. If you were to start a window manager also, such
as fluxbox, your xterm window would gain the title bar and
max/min/close buttons, etc., along with any other goodies provided by
that particular window manager. If you were to start an entire desktop
environment such as KDE or Gnome, you'd get all of the above plus
menus and multiple desktops and file managers and control panels and
taskbars and clocks on the taskbar and and and etc.
To see how some of this might work, stop any login manager you have
running (like with the command "/etc/init.d/gdm stop", as root).
Then, all as a normal user, create the file "~/.xinitrc", and put in
it the single line "xterm". Now start X manually with the command
"startx". You should see the single client "xterm" running on top of
X. Notice it does not have any window "decorations". Type "exit"
within the xterm to leave X.
Now edit "~/.xinitrc", and add the line "icewm &" above the "xterm"
line, and restart X with "startx". Now you'll see the xterm has window
decorations, along with the other goodies provided by the icewm window
manager. (The "&" puts icewm "in the background", otherwise the xterm
would not run until the icewm was exitted.)
Kill X, and edit your .xinitrc file, and take out the "xterm" line; if
you "startx" now, X will start, icewm will start, icewm will go into
the "background", and the system will read the next line in .xinitrc,
which doesn't exist, so the system will think it's finished, and X
will die. (You probably won't see icewm load; it'll all happen rather
quickly.)
So remove the "&" so that icewm doesn't go into the background, and
try again. This time X starts, and icewm starts, and you've got a
functional X instance with icewm as your window manager.
You can use any other window manager (such as twm, or fluxbox, or
wmaker, etc) or client (such as firefox, or ktux, etc).
When you've finished tinkering/experimenting, you can restart your
normal login manager with "/etc/init.d/gmd start".
Hope this helps you understand things.
Thank you for these explanations, I was using, and wondering about all
this since I moved to linux,for over a year now. Thanks again.
Thierry
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