Tutorial

From a single PC to Terminals and Servers

Introduction

When people bring home a new PC and switch it on, they expect to see a nice graphical user interface, with some kind of windowing system where they can run whatever software is installed on the PC. This is true whether the PC has Microsoft Windows installed, or one of the Linux distributions like RedHat, Ubuntu, etc.

However, if the PC is running Linux, then the software running behind the scenes is split into a number of separate entities. In particular:

• the user interface - keyboard, mouse, and screen - is managed by an X server program.

• the application programs (OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, etc.) are known as X clients – they communicate with the user through the X server.

When the X server and X clients are all working inside a single PC, they constitute an X Workstation.

However, it is equally possible to run the X server and the X clients on different PCs.

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