It depends on the server type, of course. At one extreme, a Linux terminal server may be running hundreds of X sessions, since that is what it is serving. And on some ordinary servers, X can be useful for configuration. Two of the Linux servers I run have X installed, but it is not normally run.
On a sunny day (Sun, 03 Dec 2006 23:50:32 +0100) it happened David Brown wrote in :
Agrreed, X is nice (I still use fvwm with 9 xterms open) for config, and also you can run firefox to see if 127.0.0.1 is working :-)
Not really, typically X runs on the machine with the keyboard and the display. (in X terminology this "terminal" is called the X server as it provides the "inputdevice" and "display" resources to the client application programs.) the X-client applications run on the server (things like the window manager and any applications, these require the xclient libraries (xlib, and typically things like lesstif, gtk, sdl, etc) but do not require X to be installed .
Bye. Jasen
That depends on the type of terminal server connection you are using. With traditional networked X, you are correct - the X server runs on the user's local machine, along with a some local X clients (such as the window manager), while other clients run on the server. But a more modern, and often more useful, setup is to use VNC or nx for the communication. This requires far less of the client (and can thus easily work with a windows client, without needing cygwin, xming, or any other X server, or with a very simple thin client), and far less of the network (ideal for working outside the office). In this case, the X server itself (such as vncserver) is on the server.
That's exactly wrong. VNC uses far more network bandwidth as it transmitts bitmaps instead of high level instructions. VNC is great for controlling systems that aren't designed for remote GUIs such as windows 9X, but is otherwise mediocre as it'll spend far more time sending graphics and will often miss transmissions of modified screen areas. Often menus will fail to appear because VNC missed the screen modification whereas remote X will never miss such activity.
To some extent. some x applications (eg early versions of freeciv) call xlib once for each pixel update, that's fast enough on the console, but crawls over a network connection. for the most part though you're right X is faster than vnc.
Bye. Jasen
often
aAs often, it is a case of YMMV. Basic VNC transmits large bitmaps, and therefore uses a lot of network bandwidth, but more advanced VNC's use a lot of compression and track screen changes, to minimise the traffic. And if you have the right combinations of VNC client and server versions, the server can track the screen at a lower level and send change commands rather than the bitmaps (this is certainly true for the windows version of tightvnc - I haven't tested it on the *nix versions).
For some types of application, X uses much less data because it sends meta data rather than the final bitmaps. However, X uses orders of magnitude more packets than VNC, so if your network has significant latency (such as over the internet), then X suffers greatly. The whole concept of NoMachine nx is to collect X packets and send them as bunches to minimise latency.
Thus X works well enough over an ethernet connection, but is barely useable for anything more than xclock via ADSL. VNC will use up more bandwidth, but is perfectly practical over ADSL for many things (not graphically demanding applications like EDA, however), especially with a modern accelerated version. It is also the most cross-platform system, and the easiest to set up and use. nx is the most network friendly, but is not as simply to get working.
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