X Window Tutorial – X Display Server HowTo And Cheatsheet

Posted on April 17, 2024April 18, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

Even just because of its very long service lifetime, it is certainly worth the effort to have a look at this amazing piece of software. It does not matter if we are about to switch to Wayland (that by the way cannot completely replace the whole X Window System - think for example to XDMCP): the truth is that systems running X Windows will stay here for 10 years more, so 'm sure it is still worth the effort to have a good understanding of it. The "X Window Tutorial - X Display Server HowTo And Cheatsheet" post provides you with all the necessary skills to become an expert on this amazing piece of software that really made the story of UNIX and Linux.

X window – display manager (remote XDMCP) and thin clients

Posted on April 2, 2024April 18, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

X Window System is a legacy (1984) windowing system, that is a system providing the basic framework for a GUI environment initially developed as part of Project Athena at MIT. The currently available X protocol version is 11 (dated 1987!) - hence often people refer to X Window as "X11''.

It is really time I wanted to write a few posts on this amazing software that really made the story of IT on the UNIX and Linux platforms: it is one of my favorite software ever, it was really impressive in those years being able to run an application on a host while being able to just render on a remote display.

In the X window - remote display manager (XDMCP) and thin clients we see how to reproduce on a modern Linux distribution a very common setup of the late '80 and early '90: a remote server running applications rendered on X Window based thin clients.