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X Power Tools
stoolpigeon writes "The X Window System has been around for over twenty years and is the display system for an incredibly wide range of operating systems. With the number of Linux users growing, there are more people working with X than ever before. Most modern desktop environments provide user friendly interfaces that make modifying X rather simple. There is not a need to dig into config files and settings as in the past. For those environments without such tools or for the user who loves to dig deep into their environment, this book can be a simple way to understand how X works and how to tweak it in any number of ways. If you want things that 'just work' and have no interest in digging around below the surface this book is not for you. On the other hand, if you think the best thing to do with a shiny new tool is to take it apart, well "X Power Tools" by Chris Tyler may be just for you." Read on for the rest of JR's thoughts on this book.
X Power Tools
author
Chris Tyler
pages
254
publisher
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
rating
9/10
reviewer
JR Peck
ISBN
0-596-10195-3
summary
The author, Chris Tyler, is a professor at Seneca College in Toronto as well as a programmer and Linux user. His first book published by O'Reilly was "Fedora Linux: A Complete Guide to Red Hat's Community Distribution", published in 2006. He cites the growth in X users, combined with active development and the lack of existing books that address X as the motivation for writing "X Power Tools."
X is the windowing system on a wide range of Unix and Unix like systems. Chris is obviously most familiar with Linux and so the material is heavily Linux oriented. This is most apparent when the book deals with Session Managers, Desktop Environments and Window Managers. The material focuses on Gnome, KDE and Xfce and their associated components in regards to X. For the Linux user this could be a valuable resource.
When I've had issues in working with X locally and over the network, I've found that while what I need is available on the web, getting just what I need can be very labor intensive at times. Usually just what I want is spread across tutorials, on-line man pages and forum posts. Sorting out what applies to my situation can be especially difficult when I'm not even sure just how things work for my setup. Chris makes this kind of guessing unnecessary and provides the locations and function of key files. He also spells out how the most important files and tools can be best used.
For the sysadmin on another platform, these Linux specific sections are not going to be much help. Most of the book though, deals with X itself. I've already loaned my copy to one of our AIX admins more than once and I think he plans on picking up a copy of his own.
When Gnome and KDE provide an interface for modifying or customizing X functionality, the book gives at least the name of the program and sometimes screen shots and explanations of how the tool works. This is always after an illustration of how to get the job done with the tools that are a part of X itself. From fonts to keyboard layouts, multi-display to kiosks, everything required is laid out in straight forward terms.
For me, as a Fedora user, this means that having read this book I approach my work environment with a new level of confidence. Behaviors that used to puzzle me, now make complete sense. Quirks that bothered me, no longer need to be tolerated as I know have the tools to get things working just the way I want, rather than using defaults.
The book has just come out, so it was being written before the release of KDE 4. I've looked through the documentation and I don't think any of the changes to programs like KDM or KWin make the information in the book out of date. In fact, according to the KWin release notes, when discussing KWins new compositing support, "...manual configuration of X may be required for proper results..." So if you are a KDE user that likes to live on the edge, this book may come in handy.
O'Reilly says that their "Power Tool" books are comprised of a series of stand-alone articles that are cross-referenced to one another. To be honest, it didn't feel much different from reading any other tech book. Topics flowed naturally and the articles are analogous to sections that divide up chapters in other books. One nice navigation feature is that page numbers are on the bottom of the pages while chapter and article numbers are at the top corner in a decimal notations. For example at the top of page 58 there is a grey square containing the number 3.13 which means that it is the 13th article in chapter 3.
The book has a thorough index. It also comes with 45 days free access to an electronic version through O'Reilly Safari.
For me the only real weakness of the book is that I would like to have seen more information on working with X on Unix. When reference is made to specific implementation of X it is almost always in regards to Linux. I wouldn't want to lose that, but I think a mixed environment of Unix, Linux and Windows is more the rule than the exception today. It would be more work to include other operating systems, but it would have also made the book much more valuable.
All tech books face the danger of becoming quickly useless as progress marches forward. X is actively being developed, but at the same time, looking back on its history I think this book will be useful for sysadmin and user for some time to come.
You can purchase X Power Tools from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
X is the windowing system on a wide range of Unix and Unix like systems. Chris is obviously most familiar with Linux and so the material is heavily Linux oriented. This is most apparent when the book deals with Session Managers, Desktop Environments and Window Managers. The material focuses on Gnome, KDE and Xfce and their associated components in regards to X. For the Linux user this could be a valuable resource.
When I've had issues in working with X locally and over the network, I've found that while what I need is available on the web, getting just what I need can be very labor intensive at times. Usually just what I want is spread across tutorials, on-line man pages and forum posts. Sorting out what applies to my situation can be especially difficult when I'm not even sure just how things work for my setup. Chris makes this kind of guessing unnecessary and provides the locations and function of key files. He also spells out how the most important files and tools can be best used.
For the sysadmin on another platform, these Linux specific sections are not going to be much help. Most of the book though, deals with X itself. I've already loaned my copy to one of our AIX admins more than once and I think he plans on picking up a copy of his own.
When Gnome and KDE provide an interface for modifying or customizing X functionality, the book gives at least the name of the program and sometimes screen shots and explanations of how the tool works. This is always after an illustration of how to get the job done with the tools that are a part of X itself. From fonts to keyboard layouts, multi-display to kiosks, everything required is laid out in straight forward terms.
For me, as a Fedora user, this means that having read this book I approach my work environment with a new level of confidence. Behaviors that used to puzzle me, now make complete sense. Quirks that bothered me, no longer need to be tolerated as I know have the tools to get things working just the way I want, rather than using defaults.
The book has just come out, so it was being written before the release of KDE 4. I've looked through the documentation and I don't think any of the changes to programs like KDM or KWin make the information in the book out of date. In fact, according to the KWin release notes, when discussing KWins new compositing support, "...manual configuration of X may be required for proper results..." So if you are a KDE user that likes to live on the edge, this book may come in handy.
O'Reilly says that their "Power Tool" books are comprised of a series of stand-alone articles that are cross-referenced to one another. To be honest, it didn't feel much different from reading any other tech book. Topics flowed naturally and the articles are analogous to sections that divide up chapters in other books. One nice navigation feature is that page numbers are on the bottom of the pages while chapter and article numbers are at the top corner in a decimal notations. For example at the top of page 58 there is a grey square containing the number 3.13 which means that it is the 13th article in chapter 3.
The book has a thorough index. It also comes with 45 days free access to an electronic version through O'Reilly Safari.
For me the only real weakness of the book is that I would like to have seen more information on working with X on Unix. When reference is made to specific implementation of X it is almost always in regards to Linux. I wouldn't want to lose that, but I think a mixed environment of Unix, Linux and Windows is more the rule than the exception today. It would be more work to include other operating systems, but it would have also made the book much more valuable.
All tech books face the danger of becoming quickly useless as progress marches forward. X is actively being developed, but at the same time, looking back on its history I think this book will be useful for sysadmin and user for some time to come.
You can purchase X Power Tools from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
From man xorg.conf, verbatim:
...
VIDEOADAPTOR SECTION
Nobody wants to say how this works. Maybe nobody knows
On the more serious note, Xorg might have some misfeatures and shortcomings - that don't really justify everyone whining there, but, well, it's kind of typical - but the sheer fact that something designed over 20 years ago to operate with hardware and software long forgotten still does its job well and manages to keep up with other windowing systems even when it comes to bells and whistles (Composite, etc.), while being ABI (ABI, mind you, not API) compatible with software that actually is 20 years old, means something. That's one solid piece of engineering, the kind one doesn't see often.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
> Look, I know this is the standard FOSS fanboy answer to any criticisms about anything and everything,
> but it's gotten tiresome - it doesn't actually address the criticism at all.
Actually it is more response than the original poster deserved. Go reread it, he complaimed that it is old. No specific complaint, no suggested solution.
And you fail to understand the FOSS idea. The line between users and developers doesn't exist. If you don't like it you are free to fix it. Iven if you aren't a uber coder who can write GL drivers in their sleep you can at least learn enough to make good guggestions, bug reports or hell, contribute some better documentation. If you can't code or at least understand the system enough to make constructive criticisms and suggestions for improvements then you really should just shut up and accept what you get because talking from ignorance just reduces the signal to noise and makes it harder for those who do have a clue to get on with improving the stuff you use.
10 to one both you and the original poster don't even realize GNOME and KDE aren't even part of X. That sort of ignorance is what makes every thread about X devolve into silly rants about GUI usability and brings out the Mac fanbois. X itself is just fine now and with some of the current improvements working their way towards mainstream it will only get better.
Democrat delenda est
It's good to look at why one wants to replace something, and not replace it if it's not broken.
But really, X *is* a dinosaur. The drawing operations it has to support were neat when we had 1-bit displays, but aren't that useful (or accelerated) on modern hardware. Its imaging model is completely different from modern printers and page definition languages. Antialiasing and transparency (at the window level) is obviously an afterthought, and resolution-independence was an early goal that nobody really got working. Font support is only so-so. Color calibration is basically nonexistant. It has a bunch of individual features which run great, but not with each other, like OpenGL and video and Xinerama. Compositing support is still kind of flakey. Network support can be useful but X11 screwed up the design. The Unix Haters' Handbook has a whole chapter of other issues.
And sure, we could (and probably will, eventually) fix each of these things. But X11 seems to never drop its old baggage, even when nobody's using it. So when somebody wants to fix fonts or colors, they'll do that by adding new extensions (which have to be installed in the server, yay), and now we'll have N+1 ways to do these things, and still most people won't use the good new way. Anybody who's done software testing can tell you about the reliability of N orthogonal features; it's no wonder compositing + video + OpenGL + Xinerama doesn't work.
There's something to be said for wiping the slate clean and saying "OK, it's 2008 and we now know how to do compositing and acceleration and video and fonts and colors, so we're going to throw out all the dead ends we've created in the past 25 years, and start fresh". (You can even run X11 inside whatever graphics system we create, like X11.app on the Mac.)
Writing a network protocol for a graphics system isn't fundamentally that hard to do. There's no black magic here. Linux users claim to know better than anybody the problems with a monoculture. And yet, X11 is so monstrous that there's really only room for one implementation; there simply aren't enough graphics geeks who are willing to put up with the pain of maintenance to support several. So when Xorg forked, it was a Really Big Deal. It shouldn't be! Note that the programs that open-source does best are those that we have a million of (like text editors, or chat clients, or MP3 players), and those that we always complain about are the big monsters that nobody is crazy enough to write a new implementation of (X11, OOo, Moz). I do not believe this is a coincidence.
I would really like to have a graphics system that is simple enough that I (with only a 4-year degree in computer science) can understand, and which we're using because it's the best design we can come up with, not because it's the only free windowing system we could find in 1984.