On Thursday 08 December 2011 14:23:14 Timothy Murphy wrote: > Marko Vojinovic wrote: > > From the above I would say that the X session is up and running, using > > 1280x1024, on virtual terminal 7. > > An ignorant question, but do the terms "virtual terminal", "desktop" > and "virtual desktop" all mean the same thing? No, they don't. Virtual terminal is what is also called a text console, the thing you get into with ctrl-alt-Fn. The "desktop" can mean a lot of things, but in this context it usually means the visible work-area you see on the screen when running X. A "virtual desktop" is another such surface, which is not currently visible and to which you can switch using the pager or some shortcut or otherwise. AFAICT, there is a lot of mess in the terminology about these things. There are command line interfaces, or "terminals" (real terminals, virtual terminals, consoles, login consoles, shells, X terminals, etc.), and there are graphical interfaces, or "X desktops" (real desktops, virtual desktops, workspaces, activities, screens, etc.). The only sane hierarchy I ever bothered to understand is that there are 7 or so text login terminals (the ctrl-alt-Fn things), with X server typically running inside one of them. Within the X server you typically have a "Desktop Environment" thing, which displays on the screen some portion of the "total working area" you have configured. There are various ways to cut that total area into pieces, with only one piece visible at a time on a single display. That's where it gets really messy, depending on the properties of each piece that should be shared or configured separately (like the background picture, menus, widgets and stuff). If you throw in another monitor, then it gets completely ugly, depending on how various pieces should interact with you when displayed on either of two monitors, which might have different resolutions etc... So in KDE you can have 4 activities with 3 workspaces each, driven by the Compiz window manager painting them on two "cubes" with 6 faces each, with everything displayed on a dual-monitor setup in Xinerama... Of course, all that is living in the ctrl-alt-f7 virtual console, while you get into the others by ctrl-alt-Fn. Just don't ask me what "fullscreen" would mean in such a setup... :-D Nice, eh? ;-) HTH, :-) Marko -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
