X server

X server

[′eks ‚ser·vər] (computer science) Software that draws the screen image and handles standard input in an X Windows System; in contrast to typical usage of the term server, an X server is located on the user's computer; the client is the application that is displayed, which may be located on a remote node of the network.

X server

(graphics, operating system)A process, in an X Window System which controls a bitmap display device and usuallyalso a keyboard and mouse or other pointing device. TheX server performs operations on request from clientapplications, which may be on the same computer or adifferent computer connected via a network.

Note that typical client-server architectures doinput-output on the client and processing on the serverwhereas in X the terms are reversed as the X server is servingIO rather than processing resources to the application.

If the two computers are not both Unix machines (e.g. one isa Windows machine running VNC) or if a more secureconnection is required (e.g. tunneling with ssh), theclients may talk to a proxy X server that forwards therequests to another machine where the real IO takes place.

X server

The software in an X Window system that renders images to the display screen. X servers are the user's desktop or laptop machine. In the early days of X Window, X terminals were widely used, which were hardware dedicated only to X server rendering. See PC X server and X Window. See also Xserve.