On Tuesday, March 12, 2002, at 04:33 PM, Rob wrote:
> What I'm not sure about is what I'm doing when I run these things. Am I
> interacting with one thing, just with different "shells?" Or are each
> of these programs something different? See how lost I am?
>
> Thanks in advance for any pointers to basic info. I've got books on
> UNIX, so I don't want to start there.
Check in the index of your books on Unix for anything related to "X11"
or "Xfree86". There should be a good explanation of how the Xwindows
client/server system works.
The best book I've seen for introductory purposes is "Think Unix" by Jon
Lasser. This book's final chapters are devoted to explaining what the
heck is going on in the Xwindows system.
To answer your question, you are accessing your system through a shell
when you type commands into Terminal. Any processes created as a result
of these shell interactions belong to this parent shell session. If you
fire up Xwindows with the "startx" command, then you are doing just
this -- starting up a process belonging to your initial shell session
("subshell"). But Xwindows is a pretty raw environment -- the details
are beyond me, but it's essentially a protocol for controlling window
properties. The "details" of how the windows look and behave in
response to mouse/keyboard controls are the domain of separate
applications called window managers. OrobosX is just such a window
manager -- it makes your Xwindows session "friendlier". Some window
managers are extremely customizeable if you are willing to learn a
fairly simple scripting language (check out Enlightenment if you are
interested) and there are entire web sites devoted to tweaking them. I
think themes.org is one of them.
XDarwin.app is basically a Maccentric way of starting up an Xwindows
session -- it lets you do so with a double-clickable icon and gives you
a dialogue box to choose rootless or fullscreen rather than requiring
you to specify this on the command line with "startx --rootless" or
whatever. But you still need to have a .xinitrc file in your ~home
directory to handle some of the basic startup parameters, like your
initial windows and whatnot.
But for a real explanation (I rarely even use Xwindows), you're best off
checking in your Unix books.
Erik
----
Erik Price
Web Developer Temp
Media Lab, H.H. Brown
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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