Chapter 9. The X Window System
Although the X in “Mac OS X” is not the same X as in “The X Window System,” you can get them to play nice together.
Most Unix systems use the X Window System as their GUI. (We’ll refer to the X Window System as X11, to avoid confusion with Mac OS X.) X11 includes development tools and libraries for creating graphical applications for Unix-based systems. Mac OS X does not use X11 as its GUI, relying instead on Quartz (and, on compatible hardware, Quartz Extreme), a completely different graphics system. However, an implementation of X11 for Mac OS X is available from the XFree86 Project (http://www.xfree86.org/). The XDarwin project (http://www.xdarwin.org/) provides an easy-to-install binary distribution of XFree86.
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