X Window System


X Window System

(operating system, graphics)A specification fordevice-independent windowing operations on bitmap displaydevices, developed initially by MIT's Project Athena andnow a de facto standard supported by the X Consortium. Xwas named after an earlier window system called "W". It is awindow system called "X", not a system called "X Windows".

X uses a client-server protocol, the X protocol. Theserver is the computer or X terminal with the screen,keyboard, mouse and server program and the clients areapplication programs. Clients may run on the same computeras the server or on a different computer, communicating overEthernet via TCP/IP protocols. This is confusing becauseX clients often run on what people usually think of as theirserver (e.g. a file server) but in X, it is the screen andkeyboard etc. which is being "served out" to the applications.

X is used on many Unix systems. It has also been describedas over-sized, over-featured, over-engineered and incrediblyover-complicated. X11R6 (version 11, release 6) was releasedin May 1994.

http://x.org/.

See also Andrew project, PEX, VNC, XFree86.

Usenet newsgroups: news:comp.windows.x, news:comp.x,news:comp.windows.x.apps, news:comp.windows.x.intrinsics,news:comp.windows.x.announce, news:comp.sources.x,news:comp.windows.x.motif, news:comp.windows.x.pex.