This command gives you tons of information about your current display. use the -ext option to get even more technical information.

Chapter 6: Configuing the X Window System, Localization, and Printing Flashcards by Josef Mengele

What is the X Window System?

It’s the GUI environment for linux.

-It’s either really easy or REALLY hard to configure.

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Different versions of X

X Free 86- dominant until 2004
X.org-X11-based on X Free 86. Independently developed
Accellerated-X-an alternative that you may have luck with if your video card isn’t working

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Configuring X using X itself

XFree86 -configure or Xorg -configure

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Configuring X using Distro-specific tools

Fedora has Display Settings Tool (system-config-display)
SUSE has YaST and YaST2

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X.org-11 Configuration File Format

/etc/X11/xorg.conf

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XFree 86 4.x

/etc/X11/xF86Config(-4)

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Xfree86 3.3.6

/etc/X11/XF86Config

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What’s the first step to configuring X?

Boot into text-only mode.

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X Configuration InputDevice section

You can view and modify keyboard and mouse settings

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How do you determine the amount of RAM your video card needs in certain configurations?

R= xres x yres x bpp / 8,388,608

R = 1280 x 1024 x 24 / 8,388,608 = 3.75 MB

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xdisplayinfo

This command gives you tons of information about your current display. use the -ext option to get even more technical information.

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Bitmap Fonts

Individual pixels in an array are either active or not. They’re easy to manipulate and display, so they’re good for low powered computers, but they must be optimized for display at a particular resolution. That means you’re going to need a shit load of the same character to be able to scale at different font sizes.

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Outline Fonts

These are modern, scalable fonts. They don’t look as good as bitmap fonts, especially when scaled to really small font sizes.

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Where are fonts typically stored?

/usr/share/fonts or /usr/share/X11/fonts with X.org-X11

/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts in XFree86.

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What do you do once you’ve copied fonts to a directory?

You create a summary file.

<b># mkfontscale
#mkfontdir</b>

Simple as that.

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What do you do once you’ve made your font summary file?

Add it to the X font path. Go to the Files section and add

FontPath “/usr/share/fonts/whatever”>

Font Servers

A font server will make it super easy for you to be able to distribute fonts to a bunch of computers from one central location.
Add:

FontPath “/unix:/7100”
Fontpath “tcp/fount.pangaea.edu:7100”

Or whatever your server shit may be. 7100 tells X that it’s a local server.

Xft Font System

The X font system has several drawbacks. They’re server based, they suck to print, and they don’t support antialiasing. Xft fixes this shit.

What are the five common XDMCP servers?

X Diplay Manager (XDM)
KDE Display Manager (KDM)
GNOME Display Manager (GDM)
Light Display Manager (LightDM)
MDM Display Manager (MDM)

Configuring XDM

The main configuration file is /etc/X11/xdm/xdm-config

Configuring KDM

It’s based partly on XDM, so many of the configuration options are the same. The problem is that the location of the configuration files is very unpredictable.

Configuring GDM

Uses files that are usually stored in /etc/X11/gdm or /etc/gdm

You may be able to find a GUI control tool for it, which will be gdmconfig or gdmsetup

Configuring LightDM

The configuration files are usually stored in /usr/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d

What’s the difference between an X server and an X client?

The X server runs on the computer at which the user sits. The X client is any application that makes use of X.

Using X on remote clients

If you have a powerful machine running X, you can SSH into it from your computer and tell it to run the powerful machine's X server.

Sticky Keys

When you push a special key (like ctrl, alt, shift), the operating system sees it as staying pressed for longer. This is good for people who have difficulty pressing multiple keys at once.

Toggle Keys

Plays a beep at you when you press CAPS LOCK or num lock or something

Mouse Keys

This lets you use the cursor keypad on your keyboard to emulate a mouse. cool?

Bounce (or debounce) Keys

If you press a single key multiple times by accident, Bounce Keys can compensate for it

Slow Keys

You have to press a key for a while for it to register the keypress.

Keyboard Repeat Rate

How long it takes for the keyboard to repeat the key you're holding down

Time Out

You specify a time for AccessX to stop doing shit

AccessX

A completely OUT OF DATE AND DEFUNCT APPLICATION THAT WE NEED TO LEARN that lets you configure accessibility options that may otherwise be hard to fuck with.

Where is your time zone information stored?

/etc/localtime It's not a plaintext file. Do not attempt to modify it with a text editor. it can also be contained in /etc/timezone (Debian) /etc/sysconfig/clock (Fedora)

What command will you use to set a timezone specification for one user?

TZ. You probably won't ever actually have to do it.

Codesets

The oldest encoding method is ASCII. It only supported English and punctuation. ISO-8859 was added after that, but it needed to be split into different subsets for different regions. UTF-8 is the most recent, and supports all Unicode characters.

How to change Locale

Temporarily? Set the LC_ALL environment variable. You should also set LANG. Permanently? Adjust your bash startup scripts.