E

The Components of X Products

This appendix provides an overview of some of the X products that are currently available. We summarize various vendors' implementations, and discuss features that may help you to identify them. The following implementations are covered:

• MIT Release 5
• OSF/Motif GUI
• Sun OpenWindows
• DECWindows
• AIXWindows
• Silicon Graphics

We also include a listing of some of the libraries that you may need in compiling software.

Some of these implementations may overlap and may contain components of several other systems. For example, the Motif Toolkit is included in most current vendor-supplied installations. Several vendors also offer applications that can switch back and forth between OSF/Motif and OPEN LOOK “modes.”

With a complete distribution, X software is installed in the following directories.

Keep in mind that your pathnames may differ, but the directories bin, lib, and include should exist in some form.

The names of libraries vary depending on the system—SunOS shared libraries have a .so.version or .sa.version extension, while Silicon Graphics shared libraries have a _s extension. A _p extension usually means that the library has been “profiled” for performance analysis. An extension such as _G0 indicates it was built with a specific compiler option.

The following information should help you determine what type of installation you currently have and what you would like to install.

E.1 MIT X11 Release 5

To the user, Release 5 looks very similar to Release 4. Most of the new features (such as the font server, PEX, and the Xcms color system) are more visible to the X programmer and to the administrator than they are to the user. As in R4, the include files for toolkits and related files are grouped into subdirectories. (In previous MIT releases and some vendor implementations, the include files were in one directory.)

E.2 OSF/Motif

If you administer any systems that run OSF/Motif with X, the files shown in Table E-3 should be present. Of the files listed, XKeysymDB is an important one that is often forgotten with some Motif installations. This file maps the official OSF names for keysyms—most Motif programs will complain and generate numerous error messages if they cannot find this file when they start up. XKeysymDB is included in the MIT R5 release.

The names of the OSF/Motif libraries may be slightly different on your system, depending on the release of X11. Early releases of Motif (1.0.A) came with their own version of the X toolkit library. Most people named this libXtm.a, libMXt.a, or something similar to avoid confusion with the standard MIT libXt.a. If you are compiling a Motif program on one of these systems, the Motif specific X Toolkit library needs to be linked with:

% cc -o motifthing motifthing.c -lXm -lXtm -lX11

The location of the Motif include files may also vary depending on the implementation. The default location provided by OSF places them in /usr/include, but they may be in /usr/include/X11 instead. You may want them under /usr/include/X11 in order to keep all X11 files in one place. If so, the alternate location has to be specified with the -I flag to cc:

% cc -c -I/usr/include/X11 motifthing.c

Motif programs include the header files with the Motif subdirectory prepended:

#include <Xm/Xm.h>

The complete pathname of this file becomes /usr/include/X11/Xm/Xm.h.

E.3 Sun OpenWindows

The OPEN LOOK GUI is currently packaged as part of the OpenWindows environment on Sun systems. OpenWindows is laid out differently from the MIT X installation: all software is installed under /usr/openwin, as listed in Table E-4.

Table E-5 summarizes the more important OPEN LOOK files.

E.4 DECWindows

DECWindows is moving towards a Motif-like environment, but is still different in many ways. Most of it should be quite familiar to someone used to a MIT distribution. The MIT-derived X11 is available as an unsupported subset that can co-exist with the DECWindows environment.

E.5 AIXWindows

AIXWindows is quite different than the MIT distribution and it may take some work to get it to look like the MIT environment. The names and options of standard clients have been changed from what you are used to, and the layout of the software is quite different than other vendors’ implementations. The current version of AIX, 3.2, is also missing some clients you would expect when using an MIT distribution. The layout of libraries and include files is relatively standard.

E.6 Silicon Graphics

SGI has had a decent NeWS implementation for several years, working together with the SGI Graphics Library system (GL). X functionality was added over time in a piecemeal fashion. With the release of IRIX 4.0, X11 is an integral part of the server, and works well along with GL and NeWS. The clients are based on OSF/Motif, which comes with the OS.

E.7 A Guide to X11 Libraries

When compiling software, you may suddenly discover that it requires a library you've never heard of. In your X11 adventures, you may see references to the following libraries.