X11 Configuration
The X window system, formally know as X11 Release 6 or X11R6
for short, is a powerful, portable window frontend to computers.
One of the reasons that it is so powerful and portable is
that you can configure just about everything about it.
Unforetunately, there is no pop-up window that lets you
click your way to personal set-up bliss, the manual pages
on X11 are obscure and the six volume set of documentation
is daunting. X uses a customizable control file called
.Xdefaults that resides in your home directory. You will
want to edit this to use your favorite fonts
and colors. To control which
programs are run at login, you will want to create a file
called .my_xinitrc that specifies what should be run when
your session is initialized. I recommend that you find
someone who has a working one and use theirs as a template.
The most commonly twiddled settings are
given below. More customization (such as remapping the
keyboard) is possible; it just takes more work.
You need to tell X where to display your windows. This
is done by setting the DISPLAY
environment variable
Depending on your shell
you type setenv DISPLAY "computer.address:0" (for the
c shell, csh, or tc shell, tcsh), or you type
export DISPLAY=computer.address:0 (for the bash shell).
Where computer.address is
the address of the computer you are using. The :0 on the end of
the computer address tells X to use the primary (and almost always
only) monitor associated with that computer.
The X window system has a permission system that controls who
has the ability to display a window on your screen. If anyone
can display images on your screen, you will get things like the
emacs sessions of people who forgot to set their DISPLAY environment
variables appearing on your screen. Or someone might pop a lewd
photograph up during a debugging session with your advisor. To
stop this sort thing, the permissions on physics are quite strict.
By default only arthur, xphys1 and physics can display windows on
eachother's consoles. To add another host to this list type
xhost +computer.name where computer.name is the name of the
computer you wish to include. To remove a host's permissions type
xhost -computer.name. Be careful, you can remove permission
for your own windows if you delete the your host from its xhosts
list!
There is a nice tool called xfontsel that helps with
selecting fonts.
I recommend using fixed width fonts because emacs has trouble
keeping track of variable spaced fonts. Choose the characterisitcs
that you want your font to have and then copy them into
your .Xdefaults file as the value for the Xterm*font variable.
You can set several different backgrounds and foregrounds
(emacs, xterms, defaults). You could make xterms on different
computers use different colors. I recommend using the
xco color selector although xcolorsel is also
nice. Choose the foreground (font) and background (window) colors
that you like and enter them into the .Xdefaults file as
the values for the Xterm*foreground and Xterm*background variables,
respectively.
To reload your .Xdefaults file after you have modified it
type xrdb -load ~/.Xdefaults.
Last modified 9/14/95
College of William and Mary, Dept. of Physics
matt@physics.wm.edu