Needs educating: Message from Linux (fwd)

[Georgina]

Hi

Here's how I see it, I might be entirely wrong but its how I understand things:

You want to eat some cake?  Well you can buy a uniform one off the shelf.  
The one you buy today will taste the same as the one you buy next week.  You 
can't really change any aspect of it.

However, you can make one yourself and you can choose which of the many 
available parts to make up your whole.  You can gather a variety of 
parts or can even go back as far as growing them yourself.  Thus you don't have 
to spread your cake with jam to make it palatable, you just make it to fit 
your taste.  If X is the flour, eggs and butter.  Gnome and KDE are different 
combinations of fruit or other flavourings.

Jam here in the UK means fruit preserve, I think that it is known as jelly in 
other parts.

Gena



>         Thanks.  I understand what you are saying.  Does this mean that 
>there would not be a fix for X-Windows like the MSAA in Windows?  Would we 
>need some kind of major off-screen model?
>
>-- charlie Crawford.
>
>At 11:09 AM 1/22/02 -0700, you wrote:
>>Actually, being familiar with X myself, I'll answer this one.
>>
>>Xwindows, is a misnomer, in reality, it's just an X server, and clients. The
>>server draws to the screen, and sends user input to the clients. The clients
>>are the applications, the clients are usually on the same machine as the
>>server, but they don't have to be.
>>
>>X itself is nothing more than a network protocol for sending graphic data to
>>an X workstation, the X protocol has no provisions for button, text box, or
>>any widgets for that matter, it has: line, circle, filled circle, rectangle,
>>filled rectangle, pixmap, etc...
>>
>>X also sends keyboard input and mouse click locations to the applications
>>that own the windows they occur in.  Beyond that, X's only other capability
>>is to send text glyphs (rendered in a given font) back to applications that
>>request them.
>>
>>As for widgets, and controls, and a nice unified API for writing programs,
>>you need a "toolkit library". What's a toolkit library you ask? A better
>>question might be "what isn't a toolkit library?"
>>First of all, there are a lot of toolkit libraries out there, some are very
>>simple (Athena) while some have a full-blown callback API and can be adjusted
>>with themes (GTK, GTK+) and some are object-oriented C++ based APIs (QT).
>>They all basically do the same thing, provide functions/objects/structures to
>>the application to draw typical GUI widgets, and send draw requests to the X
>>server. Here's the hairy part, each toolkit has its own look and feel, has
>>its own API, has its own conventions, and basically has its own everything.
>>
>>There's also the seperate window manager, which is simply another X client
>>which registers a few special functions with the X server so it can get the
>>location and owner of each window and add decorations and task switching
>>behavior. Some (most) window managers do more than this, but they all do at
>>least this.
>>
>>Windows, on the other had, has the equivalent of the toolkit library and
>>window manager built into the kernel (sort of) and most applications either
>>use that, or a custom one that is very similar to it.
>>
>>I'm sure this is incomplete, but I've already been wracking my brain for an
>>hour over it, so I'll close here, feel free to ask questions or tell me about
>>parts that are unclear.
>> >       Good to see you on this list.  I wonder if there are some folks 
>> out there
>> > familiar with XWindows to share the kind of navigation that goes on with
>> > it?  I have no idea.  Is it the same icons and rdio buttons and all of
>> > tht?  How is it different than windows and how much more easy would access
>> > be to develop in the XWindows environment?  These are important questions
>> > to your point I imagine.
>> >
>>
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>
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