What I meant by 'desktop' is the window that XFree86 runs in. When I run 'startx' on command line (e.g. in a Cygwin bash process, kicked off by cygwin.bat), a large window pops up entitled 'Cygwin/XFree86'. This is different from eXceed in that when eXceed starts it displays a brief splash then runs quietly on the taskbar - when any x app is started it displays in it's own window which floats among all other windows, rather than running inside of a larger window as is the case with XFree86. The nice thing about that arrangement is that I can tile ms-windows apps next to x apps. I don't want a Linux-like desktop (cute KDE control panels, etc) - I just want xterms and x apps (running locally or remote) to play nicely with windows apps. So again, the nice thing about that is that I can work with Windows apps and x apps tiled side by side without having this huge 1024x768 x-server window blocking out much of my Windows desktop. The reason I like xterms over Cygwin's bash process because I grew up on them. I prefer the plain 100 dpi fonts, select/paste functions, keyboard mapping, etc. I could (and do) use some well made terminal progs like SecureSRT. eXceed is now up to version 7.1. I have 6.1 but I've been using XFree86 recently and just thought I'd ask whether it can be started in this run-separate-windows sort of mode. I installed KDE 2.2.1 just for fun, but it loads the cpu. I tried XFCE which is much lighter on the cpu (again, both running in the giant X-server window) but their cygwin precompiled bundle was missing a lot. I've also tried compiling their latest version, but now I'm realizing that cygwin development environment is a bit weak - I can't get any of the following packages to compile: GTK+, libiconv, glib, pkgconfig, etc. (not ported versions - these are the generic Linux sources so they probably wont compile without a bit of effort) --Chesh Ted Spradley wrote: > > On Mon, 01 Apr 2002 13:20:44 -0500 > Cheshire Cat <cheshirecat@covad.net> wrote: > > > > > Can XFree86 run as a no-desktop X server? > > It's not clear what you mean by "desktop" here. You can certainly run X > with no window manager, try it. Just start an xterm instead of a window > manager in your .xinitrc or .xsession. I think you'll find that when > you start more clients, all the windows will be placed at 0,0 and you'll > have no way to switch focus among them or move them around. > > > That is to say can it > > behave like Hummingbird's eXceed version 6.x, where there isn't any X > > desktop or window manager to speak of - X apps just popup onto the > > Windoze environment (I guess there's still a window manager, but it > > just manages each X window - not a desktop; perhaps that behavior is > > due to an eXceed proprietary wm (?) > > I believe what's going on here is that window management services (focus > and placement) are provided by MS-Windows. > > What are you trying to accomplish? I think you'll find that if you want > to run more than one client concurrently, you'll want some sort of > window manager. There are some very small, simple, light-weight ones > out there. I personally like Blackbox, but there are some that are even > smaller and simpler. Look around at http://www.plig.org/xwinman/ > > Also bear in mind that the window manager has no more need than any > other client to run on the same host as the server. You can put your > window manager on any convenient host and start it automatically when > you log into the X server host. <snip>
