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Network Operating Systems-I

notes 4.1 Configuring Desktop

At the heart of all the software on your computer is the Linux kernel—the software that provides
the core services that comprise an operating system.
You can work with the services that the kernel provides in a couple of ways. One way is through
a terminal window and a set of text commands to manipulate the machine, much like old-time
PC users used DOS to do their work.
But many people don’t want to do this. They prefer a graphical user interface on top of the kernel,
so they don’t have to remember commands or long strings of fussy parameters—indeed, so they
don’t even have to know how to type!
With Windows, the operating system and the GUI on top of it are bound together so tightly that
it’s virtually impossible to run the OS without the GUI anymore. Furthermore, with Windows,
you don’t have a choice of GUIs. This is not the case with Linux.

The X Window System (commonly known simply as “X”) is a piece of software that runs on
top of the Linux kernel and provides windowing capabilities. X has been through a number of
versions, with version 11 finally gaining critical mass and developing widespread are GNOME
and KDE, and popular distributions include at least one of these desktops (and usually both).

Example: SuSE ships with KDE “out of the box.” Red Hat upset a lot of folks when it
released Red Hat Linux 8.0, which presented the user with a combination of GNOME and KDE,
using components of both in a theme called “Bluecurve.” Fedora Core continues that tradition,
using Bluecurve as the default environment and theme.

You can install either GNOME or KDE, or both, during installation. Depending on your choice,
you will get the applications that fit with the desktop environment you selected.

Example: If you selected GNOME, you’ll get OpenOffice.org; if you selected KDE, you’ll
get KOffice. If you chose both, you’ll get all applications from both desktop environments.
I’ll concentrate on GNOME and Bluecurve in this book, mentioning KDE when appropriate. If
you’re interested in other window managers, you can find a central repository at acceptance. This
version is known as “X11” and you may have already seen references to it.
X11 has been through a number of upgrades, each of which has attempted to maintain backward
compatibility. The current release number is 6, so you may also see references to “X11R6.” The
first time you saw that string—X11R6—it probably seemed obscure to the point of distraction,
but now it’s not so bad, is it?
X is a foundation upon which people can create software applications that take advantage of
those windowing capabilities. One particular breed of applications is known as “window
managers”—and a number of people and groups have created them. As a result, there isn’t
just one GUI available for Linux; there are many—about a dozen, all told. Names of popular
window managers that you might have heard of include Enlightenment, Metacity, Sawfish, and
WindowMaker. But these are just window drawing packages—they handle how windows are
drawn and how they appear, how they interact with each other, and so on. Everything that
appears on the screen shows up in a window, and the window manager simply provides the
engine to control the windows.

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