118Part ILinux First Steps .Screen resolution The last major (Crystaltech web hosting)
118Part ILinux First Steps .Screen resolution The last major piece of information you may want to addis the screen resolution and color depth. There will be a screen resolutionassociated with each video card installed on your computer. The Screen sec- tion defines default color depths (such as 8, 16, or 24) and modes (such as1024×768, 800×600, or 640×480). Set the DefaultDepth to the number of bitsrepresenting color depth for your system, and then add a Modesline to set thescreen resolution. To read more about how to set options in your xorg.conffile, type man xorg.conf. If your X server is XFree86, type man XF86Config. Choosing a Window ManagerFully integrated desktop environments have become somewhat unfriendly to chang- ing out window managers. However, you can completely bypass KDE or GNOME, ifyou like, and start your desktop simply with X and a window manager of your choice. Although I m using Slackware as the reference distribution for describing how tochange window managers, the concept is the same on other Linux systems. In gen- eral, if no desktop environment is running in Linux, you can start it by typing: $ startxThis command starts up your desktop environment or window manager, dependingon how your system is configured. Although a variety of configuration files are readand commands are run, essentially which desktop you get depends on the contentsof two files: ./etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc If a user doesn t specifically request a particu- lar desktop environment or window manager, the default desktop settings willcome from the contents of this file. The xinitrcfile is the system-wide X con- figuration file. Different Linux systems use different xinitrcfiles. .$HOME/.xinitrc The .xinitrcfile is used to let individual users set uptheir own desktop startup information. Any user can add a .xinitrc file tohis or her own home directory. The result is that the contents of that file willoverride any system-wide settings. If you do create your own .xinitrcfile, itshould have as its last line exec windowmanager, where windowmanageristhe name of your window manager; for example: exec /usr/X1R6/bin/blackboxSlackware has at least seven different window managers from which you canchoose, making it a good place to try out a few. It also includes a tool calledxwmconfig, which lets you change the window manager system-wide (in the/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrcfile). To use that tool, as the root user simply typexwmconfigfrom any shell on a Slackware system. Figure 3-15 shows an example ofthat screen.