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Linux Desktop Hacks
book

Linux Desktop Hacks

by Nicholas Petreley, Jono Bacon
March 2005
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
342 pages
15h 55m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Linux Desktop Hacks
70
Chapter 4
CHAPTER 4
Related to X
Hacks #22–34
The hacks in this chapter are designed to be window manager- and desktop
environment-agnostic (that is, they don’t depend on any given window man-
ager or desktop environment, such as Fluxbox, WindowMaker, KDE,
GNOME, or XFce). For the most part, the hacks simply assume you are run-
ning a version of X11.
These hacks range from the relatively mundane (replacing the ugly gray star-
tup background with a black background) to frivolous but exciting changes
(customizing your mouse pointer to show animated graphics). You’ll also
learn two different ways to make your fancy Internet and/or multimedia
keyboard work with X11, how to access programs remotely (even if they are
running on different platforms), and how to add 3D effects and transpar-
ency to your windows.
X11, which also goes by the names X and X Windows, is the client/server
graphics engine that runs almost all the desktop environments and window
managers on Linux. Almost all Linux distributions used to include XFree86,
a free software implementation of X11. However, the folks in charge of
XFree86 changed their software license, which led to a political uproar, the
magnitude of which led eventually to a fork of the XFree86 code, and a new
version of X11 called Xorg or X.org. Xorg has many benefits besides the pre-
ferred license. It has built-in support for transparency and drop shadows,
and it often ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596009119Supplemental ContentCatalog PageErrata