114Part ILinux First StepsConfiguring Your Own DesktopToday s modern (Yahoo web space)
114Part ILinux First StepsConfiguring Your Own DesktopToday s modern desktop computer systems are made to spoon-feed you your oper- ating system. In the name of ease of use, some desktop environments spend a lot ofresources on fancy panels, complex control centers, and busy applets. In short, they can become bloated. Many technically inclined people want a more streamlined desktop or at leastwant to choose their own bells and whistles. They don t want to have to wait forwindows to redraw or menus to come up. Linux enables those people to forget thecomplete desktop environments and configure: .X The X Window System provides the framework of choice for Linux andmost UNIX systems. When you configure X yourself, you can choose the videodriver, monitor settings, mouse configuration, and other basic featuresneeded to get your display working properly. .Window manager Dozens of window managers are available to use with Xon a Linux system. Window managers add borders and buttons to otherwisebare X windows. They add colors and graphics to backgrounds, menus, andwindows. Window managers also define how you can use keyboard andmouse combinations to operate your desktop. You only need to configure X directly if your desktop isn t working (the desktopmay appear scrambled or just plain crash). You may choose to configure X if youwant to tune it to give you higher resolutions or more colors than you get bydefault. Still to come in this chapter: examining tools for tuning X and, in particular, workingwith the xorg.conffile. You ll also explore a few popular window managers thatyou might want to try out. Slackware Linux is used to illustrate how to choose andconfigure a window manager because Slackware users tend to like simple, directways of working with the desktop (when they need a desktop at all). Configuring XBefore 2004, most Linux distributions used the X server from the XFree86 project(www.xfree86.org). Because of licensing issues, many of the major Linux vendors(including Red Hat, SUSE, and Slackware) changed to the X server from X.org(www.X.org). The descriptions of how to get X going on your machine assume youare using the X.org X server. To determine which X server is installed on your system, from a Terminal windowtype man Xorgand man XFree86. If you only have one X server installed on yourcomputer (which you probably do) only the one installed will show a man page. While you are there, press the space bar to page through the features of your Xserver. Note08_