XFree86

From Grokdoc

If you find you have any trouble at all configuring XFree86, seek a tech immeditely. It's not a user friendly construct. For those of you simply curious what it does, read on.

XFree86 is some sort of badly explained desktop server thingy. I'll write a page here to be replaced by someone more knowledgeable, but suffice to say that XFree86 is the middle in a 3 part sandwich you use to make your desktop.

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A desktop is made of 3 stacked parts

Here they are:

== The Bottom: == You have the command line (black with white characters, the DOS looking part)

== The middle: == In the middle you have XFree86 which deals with all the hardware stuff the command line doesn't need, but a desktop does. Things like the mouse, displaying color, and the graphics accelerator hardware.

== The top: == On top you have the window manager, which talkes to XFree86's ability to show color and a mouse, and make that into windows.

There are also the desktop environments, which bundles a window manager, desktop icons and menus to start applications, utility programs, configuration tools, toolbars, applets, etc. The most used ones are GNOME and KDE.

Hopefully that looks something like a 3 layer sandwich.

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Problems with XFree86

XFree86 doesn't play nice with any hardware, really. Windows has a basic system in place that has defaults that work for everything. That way when you install windows the first time, sometimes it doesn't look pretty, but you have a desktop there. XFree86 comes with a set of defaults, but I have never seen them work, and the program asks you to configure it anyway, even if the default setup was ok. Configuring the thing can be a newbie's hell. There is no description of what the difference is between a "monitor" and "screen" for example. XFree86 should load the defaults right away, with just a small mention of configuration.

For example, "If you want to manually configure XFree86, click here, or click next to continue with the default setup." would be nice.

XFree86 should always come prebuilt with a window manager so the two install at the same time and are set up to work together immediately.

Lastly, for those users stuck in configuration, the driver names are insanely difficult, and should be made longer than 3 letters at all costs.

Take the popular driver for graphics cards made by the NVidia corporation. It's called "nv". Why is it not at least called "nvidia driver"? I don't know.

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