 | |
|
Technology news and Jobs 
The Linux distillery Seeing Linux clearly: Demystifying KDE and GNOME
The Linux distillery Seeing Linux clearly: Demystifying KDE and GNOME | Seeing Linux clearly: Demystifying KDE and GNOME |
|
| by David M Williams | |
| Monday, 19 May 2008 | |
|
Page 2 of 5 Back in the early days of computing, the means of providing instructions and receiving output were very basic. There were hand coded flip switches used to write programs, there were the infamous punch cards, and even at one point it was common to have line printers with keyboards attached – you sent input and got output both at this printer.You may be familiar with the UNIX/Linux editor known as vi. If you have used it, you will know vi has a command mode as well as the traditional cursor around the screen mode. The name ‘vi’ actually comes from ‘visual’, to emphasise just how amazing vi was back at the time of its arrival. Today, celebrating an editor as being visual is somewhat akin to seeing a hotel still advertise “colour TV” among its benefits, but that’s where our current technology has evolved from. And evolve it did. Microsoft brought out their graphical user interface in the form of Microsoft Windows. At first, this sat on top of DOS just like any other application. A computer running Windows 3.1 was still a DOS-based system; sure, it may start Windows automatically during startup – via a command in autoexec.bat – but DOS was still the underlying operating system with Windows sitting atop it. Windows NT 3.5 and Windows ’95 were Microsoft’s first successful operating systems which genuinely were graphical in nature. You can still invoke a command prompt and execute raw commands but the Windows environment is a part of the operating system; Windows was no longer a separately-loaded application; it was the OS. UNIX and Linux developed in a different direction. The command line was still considered pre-eminent. Utilities and useful applications were being churned out which focused on command-line input and output. A graphical user interface was produced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) back in the early '80's and this was called X-Windows, or the X Windows System, or even just X. While still catering for mouse input and windows and menus, X differed from Microsoft Windows in three fundamental ways. The first is that Microsoft Windows displayed what was happening on that computer. You can’t load a game or web page on a Windows computer you are using and send the display somewhere else. By contrast, X was designed to be used over network connections. You very well could run a program on one computer and have it send the display to another. Secondly, though, X was still – and is still – an additional piece of software. X is not Linux, nor is it an operating system at all. It is an application program which runs on top of Linux. You could go without X; you’d need to know the Linux command line to get around but you’re certainly not restricted by what you are able to achieve. Thirdly, and importantly, X contained no specification as to what buttons or menus or window title bars or anything like this would look like. X was the guts of a graphical environment but actually deliberately left out the graphical designs users work with. Isn’t that funny? If you come from a Microsoft Windows or MacOS world it certainly takes a bit of getting used to. This means you need some more software. Here’s where window managers come in. CONTINUED |
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
