Linux information
X-windows
Linux runs what is known as X-windows. This is the grandaddy of all windows
enviornment. The historical story I heard was Xerox (hence the X) was developing
the windows concept. The guys from Apple Computer visited them during
development and got a copy of the software or at least the concept. While Apple
was developing their own version, Billy Gates crew hijacked a copy during a
visit for porting applications from DOS to Apple's OS. Low and behold Windows
286 is introduced and the rest is history. Well almost. Xerox as a result of
all the hijacking, decided to take X-windows off there product development, and
put it into the public domain.
The group at Xfree86.org ported X-windows for the Intel 80x86 platforms. This
is the version that is used over Linux. As far as I can see it does everything
the bootlegged versions do. Its well documented, easier to use, more consistant
and more stable.
There are a number of window managers that can be layered on top
of X-windows. A popular combination is Enlightenment and Gnome. Elightenment
provides an intermediate layer to allow window managers to be switched on the
fly with fully cusomized setups for each user of the computer. Another popular
window manager is KDE. There are several good ham applications written using
KDE interface. With Enlightenment, I could switch between KDE and Gnome if I
wanted to go that route.
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