Re: [PLUG] two window managers

On Apr 18, 2014 10:08 AM, "Rich Freeman" <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net> wrote:

On Fri, Apr 18, 2014 at 9:57 AM, Carl Johnson
<cjohnson19791979@gmail.com> wrote:
> I read through this.....
>
> http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Deployment_Guide-en-US/s1-x-runlevels.html
>
> which seems to address what you're talking about.

I forget some distros still use numeric runlevels. :)

Yes, the old way of doing it was to run xdm in something like runlevel
5, and not run it in other runlevels.

X11 is pretty flexible and modular. X itself just runs the server -
you can just type "X" at a command line and you'll get a blank screen
(maybe gray, maybe black) and a mouse cursor that doesn't do anything.
So, scripts like startx are designed to let you easily launch X and a
few other programs (window manager, launcher, maybe some xterms, etc)
at the same time, so that you don't have to switch back and forth
launching them one at a time. Then display managers came along which
basically are programs that start X and then attach as a client to
give you a login screen of some kind (or they can manage remote
servers like X terminals as well).

A lot of X11 makes more sense if you understand the history behind it all.

That makes me wonder if a fundamentals of X11 talk might be useful at
PLUG. Sort of a ditch Gnome/etc and start from the ground up sort of
thing. Understanding DISPLAY, xauth, the client/server model, the
typical major clients like display managers, session managers,
launchers, etc, maybe even things like geometry/xrandr/drm/etc.

Rich
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