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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 ...