Re: what are the respective tasks of windows manager, desktop, and the gui app

cczjason@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
1. Does the desktop depend on the window manager heavily ?

No -- desktop environments are often shipped with their window
managers (e. g. Gnome/metacity, KDE/kwin), but in many cases you
can just use a different one if you like.

Without a desktop but just a window manager and the X server,
can we start up some GUI program, such as the terminal
emulator, and with the help of the window manager, will the
emulator have the window boarder and be dragged to anyware using
the mouse ?

Yes.

2. when we click a pull down menu, is it the gui app itself
telling xserver to draw menu , or the gui app just communicates
with the window manager, then the window manager takes care the
rest of all? Such as sending requests to draw the menu in the
style it likes.

The pulldown menus inside the application are drawn by the GUI
libraries it uses (e. g. GTK+, Qt). The window manager is only
responsible for

- the desktop (color, wallpaper, icons drawn on it)
- window borders (shape, size, functionality)
- the window menu (often accessible by a field in the upper left of
the window)
- how mouse buttons and keystrokes behave (e. g. shortcuts, how do I
resize windows, etc.)

GUI libraries sometimes have their own style management facilities
(e. g. qtconfig for Qt).

3. when the menu disappears after a click, is it the window
manager that restoring the original gui app's clinet area ? the
gui app does not know at all that part of its client area have
been overlayed and restored. ?

I'm not absolutely sure, but normally it doesn't. IIRC in most cases
the application gets sent a message by the window manager which
part of it should be redrawn.

You could play around a bit with a stand-alone window manager like
Fvwm2. In its configuration file you can configure many things the
window manager does to fit your needs.

Regards,


Björn

--
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We ran out of dial tone and we're and waiting for the phone company
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