some general x questions...

[cotfessi]

off and on for the last few weeks I've been putting together a debian box piece by piece. I installed using floppies and have used apt-get to install pieces, a little at a time. My whole goal here is to really learn what the hell is going on inside my linux box. I started with Redhat and then moved to mandrake, but still wasn't really sure about how everything fit together. Building debian up from a minimal install has been a great learning experience.

anyways, enough bs. I'd now like to get X running and I'm a little confused about what a window manager is vs what a desktop is? I went to http://themes.org just to take a look at some of the screenshots and they have KDE, GNOME, but there are also a lot of others... icevm, afterstep, blackbox(sorry if I spelled those wrong)

up to this point I've really only played with Gnome and KDE. can someone explain what these other ones are about?

Thanks
-cotfessi

[GNU/br0wni3]

Hola,

Hmm.. im no expert, but i posted something on this before...

In "layman"'s terms:

X is the graphics server. It has the ability to display nice colors and stuff in your linux box.

A "Window manager" is the thing that draws the pretty windows and icons.

A "Desktop Manager" is a *complete desktop solution*. this meaning: it draws pretty windows and stuff, and its loaded with lots of stuff (text editors, media players, utilities)

KDE and GNOME are great both. Its just a matter of taste , really. Install them both and switch between them (Command: switchdesk) until you feel totally comfortable with one of them.

Just my 2 cents.

br0wni3

[cotfessi]

thanks