X windowing system
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That said, FreeBSD's use as a desktop OS is certainly made much friendlier by the use of the X windowing system. X windows does not give you a pretty GUI all by itself, rather it gives you the ability to run another desktop application (see [[gnome]], [[kde]], [[xfce]], [[blackbox]] and [[windowmaker]] for examples of these). | That said, FreeBSD's use as a desktop OS is certainly made much friendlier by the use of the X windowing system. X windows does not give you a pretty GUI all by itself, rather it gives you the ability to run another desktop application (see [[gnome]], [[kde]], [[xfce]], [[blackbox]] and [[windowmaker]] for examples of these). | ||
| − | [[Category: Ports and | + | [[Category: Ports and Packages]] |
Revision as of 21:21, 16 December 2004
X -- you may see it refered to as X11 or the X windowing system -- is what most unixes use for their graphical user interface (GUI). It works on a client-server model, meaning that you have an X server on your system, and also a client that connects to it. It can be (and usually is) a real pain to setup if you haven't done it before and don't know the specifics of the system that you're configuring it on. You can install it from ports (or as a package) after you've installed your main system or right at the install stage. As a general rule, it's not installed on servers. The main reasons for this being that a) it's a network-aware app and as such can be a security risk and b) most servers don't need it, and it'll just go unused and take up disk space that can be used for other programs or data. If you're interested in controlling a server via a GUI, check out the webmin package in ports.
That said, FreeBSD's use as a desktop OS is certainly made much friendlier by the use of the X windowing system. X windows does not give you a pretty GUI all by itself, rather it gives you the ability to run another desktop application (see gnome, kde, xfce, blackbox and windowmaker for examples of these).
