)
Fig. 22.1 Under Red Hat, X bears a striking resemblance to the popular Microsoft Windows 98 user interface.
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fvwm provides multiple virtual desktops for users who want to use them. The screen is a viewport onto a desktop that’s larger than (or the same size as) the screen. Several distinct desktops can be accessed. The basic concept is one desktop for each project, or one desktop for each application when view applications are distinct. Because each desktop can be larger than the physical screen, windows that are larger than the screen or large groups of related windows can be viewed easily.
The size of each virtual desktop must be specified at startup; the default is three times the physical size of the screen. All virtual desktops must be the same size. The total number of distinct desktops doesn’t need to be specified but is limited to approximately 4 billion total. All windows on the current desktop can be displayed in a pager, miniature view, or the current desktop. Windows that aren’t on the current desktop can be listed, with their geometries, in a window list, accessible as a pop-up menu. (The term geometries specifies the coordinates and number of pixels needed for the window under an X window manager.)
Sticky windows are windows that transcend the virtual desktop by “sticking to the screen’s glass.” They always stay put on-screen. This is convenient for things such as clocks and xbiffs, so you need to run only one such utility, and it always stays with you.
NOTE: The xbiff application notifies you when new mail arrives.
Window geometries are specified relative to the current viewport—that is, xterm-geometry +0+0 always appears in the upper-left corner of the visible portion of the screen. It’s permissible to specify geometries that place windows on the virtual desktop but off-screen. For example, if the visible screen is 1,000×1,000 pixels, the desktop size is three-by-three, and the current viewport is at the upper-left corner of the desktop, invoking xterm-geometry +1000+1000 places the window just off the lower-right corner of the screen. It can be found by moving the mouse to the lower-right corner of the screen and waiting for it to scroll into view. You can map a window only onto the active desktop, not an inactive desktop.
A geometry specified as xterm-geometry -5-5 generally places the window’s lower-right corner five pixels from the lower-right corner of the visible portion of the screen. Not all applications support window geometries with negative offsets.
The fvwm95 window manager for X11 is “a hack based on fvwm2.x.” The developers’ goals were to simulate the major features of a well-known operating system’s GUI, to make the users more comfortable in a UNIX environment, and to avoid bloating the simple and clean GUI code of fvwm. For more information, go to
http://mitac11.uia.ac.be/html-test/fvwm95.html.The olwm window manager for the X Windows system implements parts of the Openlook graphical user interface. It’s the standard window manager for Sun’s Open Windows product, but it works properly with any X11 system, including XFree86. The only requirements for running olwm are that the server have the OPEN LOOK glyph and cursor fonts available, which should be the case if you installed all the available fonts for X Windows.
Enlightenment is a popular and nicely-written window manager. It is stable and runs fast. Although it was initially based on the fvwm work, its newer versions have been written from scratch. The creator of Enlightenment has a Web site at http://www.rasterman.com; it contains much more information than could possibly be included in this book.
The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is a commercial attempt to port a standard desktop to most versions of UNIX. For example, Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, and Hewlett-Packard’s HP-UX (among others) all have CDE implementations. For a common UNIX desktop, CDE isn’t bad. TriTeal ported CDE to Linux, and their version (based on OSF Motif 1.2.5) is resold by Red Hat Software for their packaging of Linux. For more information on CDE for Linux, go to TriTeal’s Web site at http://www.triteal.com; for more general CDE information, check out the Usenet newsgroup comp.unix.cde and its Frequently Asked Questions file on the Web at http://www.pobox.com/~burnett/cde/.
The K Desktop Environment (KDE) is a large freeware project that was designed to create an integrated desktop environment similar to the CDE but developed and released entirely under the GNU Public License (GPL).
• See “The GNU General Public License,” p. 799
Major benefits of KDE include a strong emphasis on correct internationalization support, an integrated help system, and a standardized look and feel for a wide variety of applications. For more information, see http://www.kde.org/.
Red Hat spared nothing in creating a distribution well tuned to X. In fact, the commercial version of the Red Hat distribution contains a one-user licensed copy of a commercial X server called Metro-X. When you start X under Red Hat with this command:
startx &
you see a screen very reminiscent of Microsoft’s Windows 98 environment (see Figure 22.1).
Fig. 22.1 Under Red Hat, X bears a striking resemblance to the popular Microsoft Windows 98 user interface.
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