Running Linux, Third Edition

Chapter 11. Customizing Your X Environment

In the last chapter, you learned how to set up the X Window System so that it recognizes your graphics board and your monitor. While this is clearly necessary, it is of course only one half of the story. In this chapter, we will tell you the other half: customizing your X environment. Unlike the hardware setup that you normally do only once for a particular computer, you might want to change your work environment from time to time because your work habits have changed, because new and better environments are available, or simply because the old one has become boring for you. Some of these environments are quite sophisticated. For examples they let you start up a program with all the options you want at the press of a key or the click of a mouse, they let you drag file icons onto a printer to have text printed, and they can do lots of other fancy things.

Today, many distributions more or less automatically configure your X server for you and put you into a graphical environment from the start. However, if things go wrong during installation and you want to fine-tune your X server (in order to achieve a higher resolution, for example) or if you simply want to use another windowing environment than the one your distribution vendor has selected as the default, we’ll tell you what to do.

We will first tell you the basics of configuring X, including what happens at startup, what X resources are, and how you can use them. In principle, this is ...