Graham Hill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: GH> xdm is the X desktop manager. It is used if you want to login from X GH> directly on start-up. This is not needed; you can start the machine, log in GH> to a console, then run startx to get X going. GH> GH> xfs is the X Font Server; it is a way of providing fonts to X applications. GH> You can however have X configured to directly access the fonts on disk GH> without going thru the font server.
It's also worth noting that: -- There are a number of display managers besides xdm (gdm, wdm, kdm) that provide essentially the same functionality but with a different look-and-feel. -- The display managers can be configured to provide (unencrypted) remote login capability to other X servers; this is mostly useful if you have a standalone X terminal. -- The font server can be configured to provide font service to other X servers. This is particularly useful if you have a personal machine and a large network of other machines with X servers, and you want the fonts you have installed on your personal machine available elsewhere; you just need to enable xfs TCP service, and run 'xset fp+ tcp/my-machine.domain.com:7100' on the machine you log in on. I've heard it suggested that you run and use xfs even on a local machine, since if font rendering happens to be particularly slow, farming it out to a process besides the X server will cause the server to not freeze. OTOH, I first heard this advice when I was running Slackware on a 386/40, so it's probably noticably less relevant now. :-) -- David Maze [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.mit.edu/~dmaze/ "Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal." -- Abra Mitchell
