[techtalk] More desktops and window managers

[stephanie1200 at netscape.net]

Many thanks to Daniel who patiently answered more questions in this thread, forwarding on for posterity.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [techtalk] desktops and window managers?
Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 13:44:15 -0500 (CDT)
From: Daniel Manrique <roadmr at entropia.com.mx>
To: stephanie1200 at netscape.net


> If you have time, do you think
> you could expound with an example?  like, say I log on to my linux
> box, open my gnome desktop session with my sawmill window manager.  
> correct me here if i go off...gnome handles my background color/image,
> the placement of my bottom bar, the icons in it, the icons on my
> desktop.  Sawmil controls the title bars and fonts of xterms, but I'm
> getting the xterm areas and the text inside them from the xserver.

everything you see on-screen is displayed by the x server. Clients that
connect to it, are the sawmill window manager, your xterm, the GNOME
panel, and the GNOME file manager.

Interestingly, the GNOME panel is strictly speaking just a program.
What GNOME does is start the panel and the file manager (the one that
controls the file icons that appear on your "desktop").

> So when I start up Netscape, i'm getting my title bar, window
> placement and movablility/closability from sawmill, the look of the
> buttons in the browser and lines and shadows and things from Gtk.

You're right about the things that sawmill displays. However, netscape
doesn't use Gtk. Netscape versions prior to 6 (and mozilla) use Motif;
later versions use a toolkit that was developed specifically for Mozilla.
The reason they're not using an existing toolkit is to allow for easier
cross-platformness.

Here's an interesting thing I failed to mention: under the Unix concept of
"desktop environment", you can have programs from one environment running
in another. I could conceivably use Konqueror with Gnome, or Gnumeric
under KDE. They're just programs, after all. Of course the whole idea of a
desktop environment is consistency, so it makes sense to stick to apps
that were designed for your particular environment; but if you're willing
to cope with an app that looks "out of place", you can do so :)

> What is X giving my browser?

Picture it in layers. The browser issues an instruction, using its
toolkit (Motif, in Netscape's case) to draw a button. motif knows that a
button is composed of a rectangle with text inside (im simplifying here
;). So the motif function tells the X server to actually draw a rectangle
and the text inside. The X server handles the low-level drawing functions.

>Who is handling copying and pasting
> text?

I think X has a clipboard facility. Im not too sure about that but the
fact that this works with practically any app would indicate the
functionality is provided by X.

>And gnome is handling sending windows from the top to the bottom
> of the stack, or is that sawmill? 

That would be sawmill, or any other window manager you're using. 

>When I use exceed, what is that
> replacing? 
>I thought is was replacing the x server, but how can i be
> getting any of this if it's not coming from the x server on my linux
> box? Maybe it is replacing the X client, not the server?

no, exceed is indeed an X server. You run exceed on your desktop box,
then connect to a remote host and run an X app there. That's a client. The
client connects to the server (you told it which server to use when you
set the DISPLAY environment variable) and then tells the server to start
doing stuff, like displaying a window, the stuff inside it, and so on.

> I'm sorry if this is tedious, but your explanation is very friendly
> and I want to take advantage of this.

I'm here to be taken advantage of. heh. Hope this stuff is useful, also,
feel free to forward this to the list if you think somebody else would be
interested.



    - Roadmaster

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Save a tree- use E-Mail!            roadmr at entropia.com.mx
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