ABSTRACT
X Window System is a network-based software package that provides the user’s friendly graphical interface. We will refer to X Window System shortly as X, or X11. X is based on the client/server model, in which the X client (application program) does not directly access the display; instead it communicates with the X server (the corresponding display program) with the single task to control displaying. X was developed at MIT and is maintained by a not-for-profit consortium of vendors and universities, first known as MIT X Consortium, succeeded by X Consortium from 1993. It is a relatively highly standardized package that runs on almost every platform; X appeared relatively late, so it presents a compromise between needs of many vendors. The best known release is X11R6, although version X11R5 is also widely in use. All efforts to standardize X11 culminated in the introduction of Common Desktop Environment (CDE), which had offered the best of X11. Today, CDE is the standard part of most UNIX installations, usually accompanied by a vendor-specific flavor of X11. CDE related X components are easy to recognize, they always do have “dt” prefix in their names (stands for DeskTop).
