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The X Window System

The X Window System is a large and powerful (and somewhat complex) graphics environment for UNIX systems. The original X Windows code was developed at MIT; commercial vendors have since made X the industry standard for UNIX platforms. Virtually every workstation in the world runs some variant of X Windows.

A free port of the MIT X Windows version 11, release 5 (X11R5) for 80386/80486 UNIX systems has been developed by a team of programmers headed by David Wexelblat. The release, known as XFree86, is available for System V/386, 386BSD, and other i386 UNIX implementations, including Linux. It includes all of the required binaries, support files, libraries, and tools.

Configuring and using the X Window System is far beyond the scope of this book. You are encouraged to read The X Window System User's Guide, by Valerie Quercia and Tim O'Reilly. See Appendix A for information on this book. In this section, we'll give a general overview of installing and configuring X Windows for Linux, but it is far from complete. The man pages and README files included with the Linux X Windows distribution should be very helpful.

The Linux XFree86 HOWTO (see Appendix A for details) contains a complete discussion of installation and configuration of X Windows for Linux. We refer all interested readers to this document.



abraham@iesd.auc.dk