Re: Looking for doc about desgin of X window system
- From: Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com>
- Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2006 00:19:21 +0000 (UTC)
In comp.os.linux.x,
Dances With Crows <daSPANnceswithcroTRAPws@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
What he said, though the man pages are going to be completely useless
for someone as inexperienced as Ronald seems to be. I'll try to
summarize at a high level.
Depends on how much he is willing to read.
X server: [...] Closest 'Doze/OS X analogue: "video driver".....
Window manager (WM): Runs anywhere, usually local. Fairly small piece
of code that (at least) allows you to move and resize windows. Also
draws the frame for all windows, excluding some X clients that say to
the WM "no, I don't have a frame". The WM usually has other functions
available like starting programs. In 'Doze/OS X, there is not really a
WM analogue; the WM is built in to the default GUI shell.
If you are making the X server the video driver, then the WM is
the GUI shell. It is what provides the look and feel of the the
system. There are WMs to imitate NeXT, Win95, WinME, Mac OS X,
probably even Mac OS 6.
Only 1 WM can run on an X server at one time. The WM does something
like XSelectInput() with a bunch of flags on the root window,
I think it is one WM per screen, so if you have a dual-head situation
you could have different WMs on each screen, sharing the same server.
The different monitors would have different root screens...
that returns an error, the WM says "Another WM appears to be running..."
and exits. You can start up an Xnest or Xvfb and run another WM there
if you really want to run 2 WMs at once.
Wouldn't that just put a different WM in a window controlled by the main
WM? An interesting recursive feat, but of limited use.
(You'd do that if you were writing a WM, for example.)
Yeah, that's one case. I think people here have suggested it for
headless X servers, for, eg, automated screen shots of webpages. Start
the server, run a browser with command line arguments to load a page,
then grab a screen shot, without pixels ever being rendered to a screen
or any human input going in.
You can run X without a WM. This is done for kiosk apps, but it is not
very useful for normal apps.
I run X with xclock being the last app started. As long as xclock runs,
my server stays up. Because of that I can kill the WM without shuting
down X. I do this so that I can switch WMs easily, although after the
first week or so I found one I liked and stopped switching. So it is
useful for temporary states, too.
(One gripe I have about that is due to window decorations (title bars,
scroll bars, etc), swapping WMs tends to move all your windows around
a few pixels. Messes up my neat fill-the-whole-screen arrangement.)
Elijah
------
only exits X when shutting down; only shuts down when power goes out
.
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- From: Eli the Bearded
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