Talk 31-08-1999 Window Managers
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Introduction to X window Managers
Here are a couple of notes about my talk:
I ran the following window managers:
- wmx with some of my custom hacks. It is my favourite, but not necessarily bug-free.
- blackbox: A small clean window manager.
- afterstep: mimics the nextstep look and feel, but eats into your colour palette.
- twm: tom's window manager - one of the earlier window managers, plain but functional.
- the gnome desktop and window manager
- fvwm: f* virtual window manager - not so long ago this one used to run on almost all linux machines. It still is very nice.
- fvwm95: A mutant of fvwm with a windows95 look.
- kwm: part of KDE, the K desktop environment
I also mentioned 9wm, an ultra minimalist window manager. Themes.org is the place to find exotic window manager configurations.
I said that Linux could run several X servers. Normally X servers are invoked
by the startx shell script or by xinit, but I ran
the X server directly.
The X server can be made to contact a remote X display manager using the command:
X -query some.remote.host.running.xdm
I did not mention it, but the command:
X -indirect some.remote.host.running.xdm
allows you to view a list of machines which run xdm and its variants.
By default the X server uses the first display on the local machine
(DISPLAY=:0), but this can be changed with the parameter:
X -query some.host.running.xdm :N
where N is some integer larger than zero, while the host could be your local
machine (ie localhost).
If you are not running xdm, you might want to try running
xinit as follows:
xinit -- :N
The key combination Control-Alt-Backspace terminates a running X server,
while Control-Alt-Plus and Control-Alt-Minus cycle through your available resolutions.
