There are a lot of packages that are related to X. The first two are mentioned by name, as they have a great influence on the look-and-feel of X.
The xview3L5.1.tar.gz
package is a port of SUN[TM]'s xview3.2
package by Kenneth Osterberg to Linux. It includes the xview toolkit,
a set of extensions to X. It will give you the look-and-feel of the
Open Look[TM] extension to X (many will know that from Open
Windows[TM] from SUN). You can get it in the /pub/Linux/libs/X
directory on sunsite
or in the
/pub/linux/binaries/usr.bin.X11
directory on tsx-11
[cf
Where do I get XFree86
].
To install it, untar the tarfile as root in some directory (e.g.
/usr/src
), read the documentation that comes with it (most important
the README) and run the INSTALL script. Note that you need about 25MB
free disk space to install it completely (with examples). This is
partly due to the fact that for some time all files are twice on the
disk. After running the INSTALL script and removing the xview3L5.1
directory you will need about 11 MB (including all examples). If you
do not want to install the examples , you will need about 9 MB. If you
do not want to compile any program that uses xview, you can
spare another 2.5 MB by removing the static (*.a
) and stub
(*.sa
) libraries. Do not remove the shared (*.so
) libraries,
though!
For running Xview you need at least 8 MB of RAM, better 16 MB.
This is commercial software, so you will have to pay for it. You can
find an advertisement from Metrolink (a company that provides a
port to Linux) on tsx-11:/pub/linux/advertisements
. There are more
companies that sell Motif. Every now and then advertisements will
appear in comp.os.linux.announce
.
Both aforementioned packages provide window managers different than
the standard twm that comes with XFree86. Many people do not like this
window manager. There are several further windowmanagers available
that run on Linux. A selection of these can be found on sunsite
in the directory /pub/Linux/X11/Window-managers
.
Sometimes you will need additional libraries to run binary
distributions of some application or to compile it yourself [cf.
Compiling X programs
]. If the first is the
case, you should find a pointer
to that library in the Readme file of that package. If you do not have
any pointer, you should look at the /pub/Linux/libs
hierarchy
at sunsite
.
Most libraries that work on Linux can be found there. If you cannot
find it there and you have Internet access, you should follow the
instructions on getting information below [cf.
Finding Information
].
There are many programs and applications available for X, far too many
to give even examples here. Look through the /pub/Linux/X11
hierarchy on
sunsite
for ports of many packages to Linux. Most programs need
no changes at all to run on Linux, so you should look at the generic
X11 program archives as well as at the Linux specific sites. One of
the largest X11 sites is ftp.x.org
. In the R5contrib
directory
you can find many programs for X11R5.
Next Chapter, Previous Chapter
Table of contents of this chapter, General table of contents
Top of the document, Beginning of this Chapter