The joy of X - master the Linux GUI

By David M Williams
Sunday, 12 October 2008 10:11

Opinion and Analysis

If you're a Linux user you have no doubt heard of GNOME and KDE. These popular desktop environments are really the pinnacle of a deep iceberg of technology with the X-Windows graphical interface underpinning it all. Here are a couple of ways to tame X, kicking off a journey of unlimited ability to change the Linux look-and-feel.

This month’s theme is “I didn’t know you could do that in Linux,” and today we’ll look at X-Windows, commonly called just “X”, which is at heart a graphical windowing interface. It has been the graphical component of both UNIX and Linux systems for decades.

X controls the desktop and provides all the facilities that any graphical program – like Open Office, for instance – will use to make a window appear on screen, permit it to be moved, resized and all the other nuts and bolts.

X doesn’t impose any style on these windows; they’re all pretty plain by default. On top of X sits a piece of software called a window manager. You can have many different window managers, but only one can run at a time. The window manager effectively provides window dressing, which makes windows have a consistent style and behaviour. The window manager provides close, minimise and maximise buttons. It gives windows a metallic border, or a purple border, or a transparent background or anything else that can be imagined.

Launch any program. The content of the main window is the program itself. The title bar above it is actually drawn by the window manager, not the program. If you launched a different window manager you would still find the program still runs perfectly normally but the appearance of the title window and borders has changed.

With the advent of Linux, desktop environments have become popular. The two most well-known are GNOME and KDE. A desktop environment sits on top of both a window manager and X itself. As well as giving a standard look and feel the environments come with a collection of tools like file managers and a clock.

You might have seen some of your favourite programs under both the GNOME and KDE desktop environments and while the program performs identically there is a difference in its visual presentation. There are many excellent tutorials about GNOME and KDE online, and how they differ, including here at iTWire. However, we’re going to delve into the bottom layer and look at X and how you can harness its power.

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