Re: X-Windows
tjobrien@Traveller.COM (Tim O'Brien) writes:
> Both actually. First, user config details, then more about
> programming. I'm at a point where I understand a good deal about
> windowing systems in general, and programming as well. I've not had
> much exposure to X, and though it seems quite powerful in terms of
> its capabilities, the configuration/customization appears very
> involved. Involved, in fact, almost to the point of overwhelming.
Well, the runtime config stuff (at least the stuff you *need* to know)
is not too bad. The place I learned about most of it was of course
the manpages, and also the X books. I actually shelled out for a
number of them, notably 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6(a/b), but I think they're
naw available in the xbooks package.
I did learn a reasonable amount of Motif, which might actually come in
handy now that Lesstif's coming along. For my purposes Motif actually
turned out to be a bad idea, but that was because you couldn't get the
source to recompile with -D_REENTRANT so it would be thread safe(ish).
X is quite layered, and from a user perspective, most of what you want
to know about at first is actually probably in your window manager's
docs, not the standard X docs. For a window manager I highly
recommend fvwm2(1x) -- it has pretty good manpages.
The other big issue is the handling of the X resource database. Many
X apps list their resource configuration strings in their manpages.
You manage these settings via xrdb(1x).
Is this at all the kind of info you wanted? Feel free to ask more
questions, but we should probably continue in private email.
--
Rob
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