X11 mac what is it

Related Article About X11 for Mac. User profile for user: najeebfromgbr najeebfromgbr. Reply I have this question too I have this question too Me too Me too.

Helpful answers Drop Down menu. View answer in context. However, for the normal Mac user, X11 is not very interesting. Loading page content. Reply Helpful 6 Thread reply - more options Link to this Post.

That clarified it nicely! Reply Helpful 1 Thread reply - more options Link to this Post. The client is the program running locally or remotely on a different computer. For example I can run protein folding engines on large servers that are in a university across the country or world and interact with the user interface in a cafe on my MacBook Pro. I have a choice of a wide variety of window managers to use. The virtual and extended desktop concepts in X11 are very different than Mac's typical you only get a screen if something is physically connected or enable spaces.

There are several downsides in that the system is different and to use it, you have to do some learning. Also - it doesn't map perfectly to Apple - cut and paste can be disorienting, mouse buttons have different functions, keyboard mapping can be tricky, and the uniformity of the Mac interface is disturbed as most X11 programs come with a wide variety of widgets.

Even the most die hard fan of X11 chrome has to admit that a lot of it is "quaint" and some of it is really hard to use for people that expect the Macintosh user interface experience.

This is more of a culture thing - some countries have delicacies that are off-putting to others - it's not right or wrong - just different heritages and long assumptions on how something is "supposed to be done". Basically, if you plan on using only commercial software, you don't need X If you plan on using open source software, you may want to keep X11 around just in case.

Many open source projects used to require X11 but now have native Mac versions OpenOffice , for example. X11 is used for most Unix GUI apps. You can use Macports, Fink and Homebrew without using a X11 app - it depends on what apps you port. This is largely because we need to do plotting a lot, and so we use Gnuplot quite often.

Also many other cool stuff usually cross-platform programs require X11, for example Wireshark, Audacity a wave editor , and Inkscape an awesome vector image editor , etc. It is interesting to see how much linux-users converted into OS X world. Here is my 0. When me converting into OS X from Linux - approx years ago I started using heavily X11 based applications, simply because i know them much more than X.

Anyway, because i'm not an photo-editor-expert, maybe will find some easy-to-use freeware native cocoa app and will throw gimp out too. X11 is really very powerful. Its base design is 30 years old and this showing how stable it is.

But have a cost pros too - but this answer is not the right place discuss them. I do web-dev and media stuff and I personally think there's no use for X11 on a Mac as long as you're not a unix network administrator or something. There's still no native port of Wireshark, but beside that I don't use X11 at all. On August 28, , Apple released Snow Leopard On July 20, , Apple released Lion On July 25, , Apple relased Mountain Lion The supported configurations are:. Note: Apple's X11 on Since our packages are only supposed to build the built-in X11, if you really want to use XQuartz and Fink you will need to make sure to keep the stock X11 installed, too.

To build packages, if you're using the stock X11 on XQuartz users on All of the X11 packages support both full-screen and rootless operation, and have OpenGL support. If you are missing any of these packages, then you're missing files from your X11 installation and may need to re install something. For example, if xdev and system-xfreedev are missing, this often indicates that the X11 SDK hasn't been installed.

One is by running the application bundle, e. Another way is via entering the startx command from a terminal window. The third method is to attempt to run a program that needs X11 from a terminal window.

The preferred method in current versions of X11 to customize your startup is to create a directory named. The xinit program interprets such a condition that as "the session has ended, I should kill the X server now, too".

Example: to run the WindowMaker window manager on startup, start with the following commands:. Then put the following contents in wmaker. Example: to run the xlogo program on startup, start with the following commands:. Then put the following contents in xlogo. If you were to create both scripts above, the result would be that X11 would start up, run xlogo , and then the wmaker window manager. Create an executable gnome-session. Create an executable gnome-panel. Example: KDE3. Create an executable startkde.

Example: KDE4. If a file named. It is not necessary to put the usual! When there is no. You can use the default file as a starting point for your own. To ensure reliable operation of Fink programs in. You can put fairly arbitrary commands in an. First, the shell that interprets the file will by default wait for every program to finish before it starts the next one. Second, xinit waits for the. This means that the last command of your.

Customarily, the window manager or session manager is used for this purpose. In fact, most window managers or session managers assume that xinit is waiting for them to finish and use this to make the "Log out" entry in their menus work. Note: To save some memory and CPU cycles, you can put an exec before the last line like in the examples below.

Example: turn the X11 bell off, starts some clients and finally execute the Enlightenment window manager:. Certain Fink packages need to be able to perform actions upon X11 startup. To allow them to do this, there is a package called xinitrc somewhat confusing, admittedly. There are currently a couple of methods available to allow user customization of the X11 startup and allow Fink packages to do their startup tasks:. The xinitrc package provides adminstrator entry points.

Fink's xinitrc package overwrites the system's default version with its own, and so you will be using Fink's version. The appropriate place to add additional programs that you want to run is immediately above the line that says. VNC is a network-capable graphics display system similar in design to X However, it works at a lower level, making implementation easier.

Fink provides Xbased VNC packages for some platforms. Check the entries here. WeirdX is an X11 server written in Java. It also supports rootless mode. Sources and a java jar file are available at the web site.

First of all: Don't Panic! There are lots of things than can go wrong with X11, and a good number of them can cause startup failures. Further, it is not unusual that X11 crashes when it experiences startup problems. This section tries to provide a comprehensive list of problems you may come across. But first, you need to gather two important pieces of information:. Display server version. You can find the version of the display server in the Finder by clicking once on the X11 or XQuartz icon and then selecting "Get Info" from the menu.

Error messages. These are essential in pinpointing the particular problem you experience. How you get the error messages depends on how you started X If you ran startx from a Terminal window, you'll have the messages right there in that window. Remember that you can scroll up. If you started X11 by double-clicking the X11 or XQuartz icon, the messages end up in the system log, which you can access through the Console application in the Utilities folder.

Be sure to pick the right set of messages, e. Class: Harmless. For security reasons, X11 prefers if these directories are owned by root, but since they are world-writable anyway it will still run without any problems.