Running Linux, Fourth Edition

Other X Applications

In this section, we will cover some material about X applications that are neither KDE nor GNOME applications. As should be clear by now, you can run these in any of the desktop environments without problems, even though they might not be as integrated.

We’ll particularly spend some time with one aspect of older X applications: X resources, a very powerful, but also confusing and difficult-to-learn way of customizing X applications.

Before we tackle the X resources, one more hint: many programs described elsewhere in this book are X applications as well and are run in an X environment (whether it is KDE, GNOME, or something else), just like the programs described here. And there are literally tens of thousands more out there on the Net — yours to discover!

The X Resource Database

If you aren’t running a desktop or if you have to deal with applications that aren’t well integrated into your desktop, you will be asked to deal directly with X resources; they are mentioned in virtually every manual page. X resources provide a more flexible and powerful way to configure X clients than using command-line options, such as -geometry and -fg. They allow you to specify defaults for entire classes of clients; for example, we could set the default font for all invocations of xterm to 7x13bold, instead of specifying it on each command line.

Recently, X resources have fallen out of favor with X developers. While they are really very flexible, they are not particularly easy ...