[plug] Xwindows

[Richard]

On Tue, 2002-05-28 at 12:55, James Elliott wrote:
> I am getting a bit confused with the various commands to start windows and
> terminals and would be obliged if someone could explain when and why you
> would use the following commands:
> 
> X
> startx
> xterm
> xinit
> xman

I can't explain the error you encounter in your first posting and I'm
only new to all this myself, but :-
X is a bit of a mystery to me. I have tried to use this command in the
past and it always locked my whole system (ctrl-alt-backspace didn't
work). This behavior was repeated every time I used it, so I gave the
investigation away. X is also not listed in man as being one of the
methods of starting an xserver.
startx seems to be the catchall script that initializes an xserver with
a range of different resources and settings and, from what I read in the
man pages, is somewhat specific to the distro you're using. It's the one
I always use to startx :)
Xterm is just a virtual terminal that allows you to enter commands, and
is started after the xserver is up and running.
Xinit seems to be a bare bones method of starting x from which,
according to the man pages, scripts like startx are built. You can run
it yourself and it will simply get settings from various config files on
your system and start a bare bones version of x, with no window manager
and one xterm if memory serves me. I have run it from my login terminal
before with no trouble, but when run from a terminal within KDE it seems
to cause errors similar to trying to run X (from any terminal).
Xman, from what I can make out, is like an x version of the terminal
documentation facility man, or something to that affect.

Once again I'm pretty new to all this myself, so others can probably
provide you with a better (more accurate?) description, but for what
it's worth :)