PARD: X Window System
GXdesktop is a project to bring users a complete desktop that is wm
independent. This means that you can download this software and have some
nice every-day graphical applications based on GTK, regardless of which
window manager you are running. It's not to replace current window managers
or things like Gnome or KDE, but to work on top of a it, and stay as wm
independent as possible.
TkDesk is a graphical desktop and file manager for several brands of UNIX
(such as Linux) and the X Window System. It offers a very rich set of file
operations and services, and gives the user the ability to configure most
aspects of TkDesk in a powerful way. The reason for this is the use of
Tcl/Tk as the configuration and (for the biggest part of TkDesk)
implementation language.
TkDesk has been influenced by various other systems and file managers: NeXT,
for laying out the file browser windows, Apple Finder, for the idea of file
annotations and, (shock horror), Windows 95, for some other (of course minor
and unimportant ;-)) inspirations.
This is a brief overview of the most prominent features of TkDesk:
- Arbitrary number of automatically refreshed file browsers and file list
windows
- Configurable file-specific popup-menus
- Drag and drop
- Files
and directories may also be dropped onto the root window
- Configurable
application bar, with several displays and cascadable popup menus for each
button, files can also be dropped here
- History of visited directories,
opened files, executed commands and many other things, which is
automatically saved to disk
- Find files through their annotation, name,
contents, size or age
- Trash can for safe "deletion" of files and
directories
- Calculation of disk usage for directory hierarchies
- All
file operations (find, copy, disk usage, etc.) are carried out in the
background
- Traversal of directory hierarchies through recursive cascaded
menus
- Bookmarks, create menu entries for often used files/directories
- Comprehensive hypertextish online help (slightly out of date in this
release...)
- Built-in multi-buffer editor, providing virtually unlimited
undo
- Remote control of Netscape and XEmacs
- Sound support
- Powerful
on-the-fly configuration of nearly all aspects of TkDesk using Tcl/Tk,
allowing for unlimited extensibility
XFce is now a set of applications including a powerful Window Manager
compatible with MWM, OpenLook, GNOME and KDE hints, a toolbar, a backdrop
manager and a system sound manager for X11.
The FreeType engine is a free and portable TrueType font rendering engine,
available in ANSI C and Pascal source code. It has been developed to provide
TrueType support to a great variety of platforms and environments.
Notice that FreeType is a library. It is not a font server
for your preferred environment, even though it has been designed to be the
basis of many high-level libraries, tools and font servers.
It's a clean-room implementation that is not derived from the original
TrueType engine developed by Apple and Microsoft, though it matches it
regarding rendering quality. To our knowledge, it's the only royalty-free
complete TrueType engine available.
Today, Drag-And-Drop (DND) is considered a requirement for
commercial-quality applications. On most operating systems, support for DND
is built-in, so everybody uses it and all programs can communicate with each
other.
On X Windows, however, there is no standard, so various groups have
developed their own protocols, with the result that programs written for one
protocol cannot talk to programs written for a different protocol. Clearly
this does not satisfy the fundamental requirement that DND allow the user to
drag data from any program to any other program.
What is required is a single protocol that everybody can use so all programs
can exchange data via DND. (The X Selection mechanism insures that everybody
can exchange data via the clipboard.)
The basic requirements for such a protocol are that it provide visual
feedback to the user during the drag and that it allow the target to choose
whatever data format it prefers from among all the formats that the source
can provide. In addition, it must be efficient so that the visual feedback
does not lag behind the user's actions, and it must be safe from deadlock,
race conditions, and other hazards inherent in asynchronous networks.
XFree86 is a port of X11R6.3 that supports several Unix and Unix-like
operating systems on Intel and other platforms.
Chart is a stripchart-like plotting program with a file-based parameter
input mechanism and a Gtk-based display mechanism. The chart program
periodically reads data from files, extracts a value, and displays these
values in one of several formats. The default format is a graphical display
similar to that of a stripchart recorder. Hence the name, "chart".
On systems such as Linux, in which the system parameters are available in
human-readable form in the /proc directory, the chart program makes a dandy
performance monitoring tool, similar to but more versatile than xload.
Instead of being limited to a few standard performance parameters, the chart
program can plot any time-variant parameter than can be read from a file or
pipe. This ability to read data from a pipe provides a very versatile and
easy to use method of setting up custom displays.
Loadmeter is a system monitoring app for X11 that displays stats and info,
primarily system load, but also disk/memory usage. It has very small
memory/desktop footprints.
The Xlogmaster is a X11 program to allow comfortable and fast monitoring of
all logfiles and every device that allows it's status being read by
cat (like the /proc devices).
It is a very useful tool for all programmers, system administrators, control
freaks or people who just like to know exactly what's going on on their
system. The program has been written under GNU/Linux but it should also
compile on other UN*X systems.
Chameleon is an X utility not unlike the Win95 Desktop Control Panel. It
allows you to select any color from a color wheel or images of almost any
format to be set as the background. Images can be either tiled or stretched.
Chameleon can be used either from the command line or through a pretty GTK
interface.
Joy2Key is a program for X and the console that monitors the joystick
(typically /dev/js0) and sends X keyboard events to application windows or
keystrokes to the console (both terminal and rawconsole modes for terminal
stuff and SVGALIB stuff respectivly). It allows the use of a joystick with
applications that don't otherwise support one, such as xkobo, iNES or sDoom.
Joy2Key supports .rcfile and easy joystick calibration.
Kjoy is a joystick setup utility for KDE. With kjoy you can easily test and
calibrate the joysticks connected to your Linux box.
© 1999 by Stefan Hornburg
<racke@linuxia.de>
Last modified 29. May 1999