X Window System
<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.
Home.
See also Andrew project, PEX, VNC, XFree86.
Usenet newsgroups: comp.windows.x, comp.x, comp.windows.x.apps,
comp.windows.x.intrinsics, comp.windows.x.announce, comp.sources.x,
comp.windows.x.motif, comp.windows.x.pex.
(1999-04-02)
Nearby terms:
XView « XVT « X-Windows « X Window System »
XWIP » xxgdb » XXX
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