Chapter 24. X Window System Environment

#### Beyond Linux® From Scratch - Version 2019-02-27

### Part VI. X + Window and Display Managers

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# X Window System Environment

This chapter contains instructions to build and configure a graphical user environment.

Xorg, in addition to clearing up some licensing issues with XFree86, introduced a completely auto-tooled build for the X Window system. This means that the packages build and install using the conventional configure, make, and make install commands, as opposed to a proprietary build system that required hand editing of configuration parameters in a C-like syntax.

Xorg also brought with it a modular build system. While this separation into modules resulted in full control of the features available to the X server on any given installation, it also made the installation more tedious as it requires installing more than 100 different packages to obtain a functional X Window environment. Most large commercial distributions have elected to use Xorg over the XFree86 distribution due to both licensing issues and the increased functionality provided by it over XFree86. With the modular build system, also came incremental updates to individual packages. The distribution of Xorg is given a release number by the developers, in this case Xorg-7, and is referred to as the "katamari" by the upstream developers.

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