Re: what exactly is xdm and xfs??

["David Z. Maze" <dmaze@MIT.EDU>]

Graham Hill <Graham.Hill@eicon.com> writes:
GH> xdm is the X desktop manager. It is used if you want to login from X
GH> directly on start-up. This is not needed; you can start the machine, log in
GH> to a console, then run startx to get X going.
GH> 
GH> xfs is the X Font Server; it is a way of providing fonts to X applications.
GH> You can however have X configured to directly access the fonts on disk
GH> without going thru the font server.

It's also worth noting that:

-- There are a number of display managers besides xdm (gdm, wdm, kdm)
   that provide essentially the same functionality but with a
   different look-and-feel.

-- The display managers can be configured to provide (unencrypted)
   remote login capability to other X servers; this is mostly useful
   if you have a standalone X terminal.

-- The font server can be configured to provide font service to other
   X servers.  This is particularly useful if you have a personal
   machine and a large network of other machines with X servers, and
   you want the fonts you have installed on your personal machine
   available elsewhere; you just need to enable xfs TCP service, and
   run 'xset fp+ tcp/my-machine.domain.com:7100' on the machine you
   log in on.

I've heard it suggested that you run and use xfs even on a local
machine, since if font rendering happens to be particularly slow,
farming it out to a process besides the X server will cause the server 
to not freeze.  OTOH, I first heard this advice when I was running
Slackware on a 386/40, so it's probably noticably less relevant now.  :-)

-- 
David Maze             dmaze@mit.edu          http://www.mit.edu/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting.  Politicking should be illegal."
	-- Abra Mitchell