7 X related packages

Contents of this section

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.

Xview

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.

Motif

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.

Windowmanagers [cf. Configuration of the window manager ]

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.

Additional libraries

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 ].

X11 Applications

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.

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