< 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: 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)