Computing Resources in ESCI

Unix Software: System: Window Managers

Description

A brief explanation of Unix GUIs may be helpful here. Unlike Microsoft Windows or the Macintosh, the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of a Unix machine is divided into three components: the windowing system, the desktop, and the window manager.

• The windowing system is the part of the software which provides programs with the ability to open and close windows, draw or write inside them, and send and recieve events (such as mouse clicks) to and from the screen. It doesn't specify what those windows are supposed to look like, or how they behave except at the most basic level.
  Just as Microsoft Windows has been the standard GUI operating system on Intel PCs for as long as there has been one, the X Windows system, written and developed at MIT, has been the standard Unix windowing system. In addition to providing the functions described above, X was designed to provide cross-network display, the ability to have a program running on one machine be controlled on the monitor of a workstation somewhere else. X also has the somewhat dubious distinction of being the software that managed to completely reverse the commonly accepted notion of client-server computing: in the X Windows world, the program running on the remote machine is referred to as the "client program", while the X display running on the local machine is referred to as the "window server". All Solaris machines in the department run X Windows.
• The desktop is the next layer of software on top of the windowing system. It provides facilities for session management, as well as additional resources for programmers (such as a library of common GUI objects, e.g. scroll bars, icons, etc.) which X Windows does not provide. (The need for such a layer is mainly due to historical circumstances surrounding the early development and first release of X - being designed in an academic setting for research on cross-network windowing systems, it didn't need such things, but when people started using X in a commercial environment (because, hey, it was free), they needed them.)
  There are two desktops installed on all of the Solaris machines in the department - OpenWindows and CDE, the Common Desktop Environment. Sun is in the process of phasing out OpenWindows and will soon only be supporting CDE.
• The window manager runs on top of all this and determines what your desktop looks like and how it behaves (e.g. whether windows get the focus automatically when the mouse moves over them, or whether they need to be clicked, etc.)
  Each desktop has a different way of specifying which window manager it will run when you log in. Many will look in your .xinitrc file in your home directory, however, CDE by default runs its own particular wm called dtwm, and makes changing this difficult. According to the documentation, you should be able to specify a different wm by placing the line
  dtsession*wmStartupCommand: /usr/site/fvwm/bin/fvwm2
  in the $HOME/.dt/sessions/current/dt.resources file. (Substiute the location and name of whatever installed wm you want to run for the /usr/site/fvwm/bin/fvwm2 part.)

Here is a list of the window managers available on the system with links to their manpages.

• mwm - Motif Window Manager
• fvwm2 - Feeble Virtual Window Manager 2 (Feeble in this context is referring to the low memory usage of fvwm2 compared to other window managers)
• vtwm - Virtual Tab Window Manager
• tvtwm - Tom's Virtual Tab Window Manager

Documentation

See Also