<
operating system, graphics> A specification for
device-independent windowing operations on
bitmap display
devices, developed initially by
MIT's Project
Athena and
now a
de facto standard supported by the
X Consortium. X
was named after an earlier
window system called "W". It is a
window system called "X", not a
system called "X Windows".
X uses a
client-server protocol, the
X protocol. The
server is the computer or
X terminal with the screen,
keyboard, mouse and server program and the clients are
application programs. Clients may run on the same computer
as the server or on a different computer, communicating over
Ethernet via
TCP/IP protocols. This is confusing because
X clients often run on what people usually think of as their
server (e.g. a file server) but in X, it is the screen and
keyboard etc. which is being "served out" to the applications.
X is used on many
Unix systems. It has also been described
as over-sized, over-featured, over-engineered and incredibly
over-complicated. X11R6 (version 11, release 6) was released
in May 1994.
http://x.org/.
See also
Andrew project,
PEX,
VNC,
XFree86.
Usenet newsgroups:
news:comp.windows.x,
news:comp.x,
news:comp.windows.x.apps,
news:comp.windows.x.intrinsics,
news:comp.windows.x.announce,
news:comp.sources.x,
news:comp.windows.x.motif,
news:comp.windows.x.pex.
(1999-04-02)