Mac OS X for Unix Geeks

Desktops and Window Managers

You can do a lot of X11 customization in XDarwin. The most significant customization is in your choice of Window manager. To start customizing, you would typically use the .xinitrc script in the your home directory. A sample .xinitrc script is provided in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.

Using the script as a starting point, you can specify which X11-based applications to start when XDarwin is launched, including which window manager you’d like to use as your default. The default window manager for XDarwin is the tab window manager (or twm), but many other DTEs are available. You can visit the following web sites to get instructions and binaries for a wide variety of window managers and DTEs.

Fink

http://fink.sourceforge.net

GNU-Darwin

http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net

OroborOSX

http://oroborosx.sourceforge.net

Once you’ve installed XFree86, you will probably want to install additional X11 applications, window managers, and perhaps other DTEs. One of the easiest ways to install additional window managers is to use Fink. Table 9-1 lists some of the window managers and desktops that can be installed via Fink. (For information on installing and updating Fink, see Section 6.1 in Chapter 6.)

Table 9-1. Window managers available for Fink

Window manager/desktop	Fink package name
Blackbox	blackbox
Enlightenment	enlightenment
FVWM	fvwm, fvwm2
GNOME	bundle-gnome
IceWM	icewm
KDE	As of this writing, support for KDE is available, but is experimental. ...