X Window System
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The X Window System is a set of protocols and programs. It is also known as X11, or simply X. It can manage windows, and other components of a graphical user interface on a bitmap display. This way of doing graphics is most common in Unix-like operating systems.
X provides the basic components to build GUI environments: drawing and moving windows on the screen and interacting with a mouse or a keyboard. X does not say what the user interface should look like — different client programs handle this. Different X11-based environments have radically different designs. X is not a part of the operating system; instead, it is built as an additional application layer on top of the operating system kernel.
Unlike previous display protocols, X was specifically designed to be used over network connections rather than on a display near the computer. X has network transparency: the machine where an application program (the client application) runs need not be the user's local machine (the display server).
X was developed at MIT in 1984. The current protocol version, X11, appeared in September 1987. The X.Org Foundation leads the X project, with the current reference implementation, version 11 release 7.3 (September 6 2007), available as free software under the MIT License and similar permissive licenses.[1]
[change] References
- ↑ Licenses. X.org (19 December 2005). Retrieved on 23 October 2007.
