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Learning to Use X11

Apr 26, 2002  By Philipp K. Janert
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A tutorial discussing how to use X11 fully and effectively.
Resources

There aren't many resources available for X11 programming, in particular not for beginners. Some useful ones are:

Christophe Tronche' X11 Pages: Includes a short tutorial covering essentially the same material that has been covered here. This site is interesting because the entire Xlib reference is available. I strongly recommend browsing it.

Brian Hammond's X11 Pages: Another personal X11 page with a tutorial, containing a little bit more information than Tronche's tutorial but less organized.

XFree86 Version 4.1.0: The official page for the current release of the open-source version of the X Window System. At the bottom of the page one finds the complete set of man pages.

X11-Related Links

Xlib Programming Manual by Adrian Nye. Volume 1 of the X Window System Series at O'Reilly. The book is wordy (it needs three chapters and almost 80 pages to cover not much more material than the present article), and the presentation is not always noted for its clarity. Nevertheless, it is probably still the standard introduction to X11 programming.

X Window Applications Programming by Eric F. Johnson and Kevin Reichard. One of the few truly introductory books on X11 programming but unfortunately out of print.

Philipp K. Janert has been programming for 15 years, both inside and outside of academia. He prefers C/C++ and UNIX but tries not to be religious about it. He holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Washington, Seattle.

email: janert@ieee.org

______________________

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how to run the program

szs's picture
Submitted by szs (not verified) on Tue, 11/23/2010 - 08:29.

HERE IS THE SOLUTION
-open terminal and type 'apt-get install libx11-dev'.this should download and install the x11 library.
-open the program and include the library 'X11/Xlib.h'.
-compile the program by typing 'g++ -o output x1.cc -lX11'
-run the program by typing ./output.

hope this helps....XD

Draw a bare window (without Close, Minimize, Maximize buttons)

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 02/11/2007 - 23:27.

how to create a window described in the subject? I cannot find out the solution.
thanks and regards

woapxp

x11 man

renu's picture
Submitted by renu (not verified) on Sun, 01/14/2007 - 15:41.

i m new to x11. i m not getting the point how to set the path be4 running x11 prog. and i m not getting the manual pages after writing the man command on the shell.can anybody help me??

how to link xlib

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 03/09/2005 - 05:41.

how to link xlib

A Simple OpenGL Program Using GLUT and C

mattv's picture
Submitted by mattv (not verified) on Fri, 08/25/2006 - 19:34.

Running FreeBSD 6.1, I find that example programs shown in "OpenGL Programming Guide, Fifth Edition" (Red Book), can be compiled as follows:

gcc -I /usr/X11R6/include -L /usr/X11R6/lib -o your_program your_program.c -lX11 -lGL -lglut

Red Book examples always use GLUT.

So, just to let you know...

Matt

Re: Learning to Use X11

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 10/09/2002 - 02:00.

Hi!

On the web there are some Xlib tutorials like this. They create one or two windows, draw few lines or arcs (some even in color) and some show the typical XLib program main loop like the following:

   Display* xDisplay;

   XEvent xEvent;

   ...

   xDisplay = XOpenDisplay(NULL);

   while(!done) {

      XNextEvent(xDisplay, &xEvent);

      ... // process the event

   }

   CloseDisplay(xDisplay);

Unfortunately it's the point where the tutorials finish. I hope there will be some continuing of this tutorial.

For example I'm unable to find how to handle linux signals in the main loop. XNextEvent() doesn't return EINTR like libc blocking functions.

Imagine you would like to write trivial clock program for X and you need catch some SIGALRM or other signal every second to refresh the clock as well as catch X events.

How to handle such task without busy waiting?

Thanks

Mity

<mity@srnet.cz>

Re: Learning to Use X11

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 05/26/2003 - 02:00.

I just made binary coded decimal clock program as my first xlib program to use events, but I didn't use events to tell the time. I just made a for(;;){ loop with sleep(1); as the first statement (this function is defined in unistd.h for some reason, and the parameter 1 means 1 second). This statement keeps the program from being active all the time. After that I just used the functions in time.h to find the time. I am not sure what other non-xlib events you might want to intercept, but you might be able to do something like this.

Unfortunate Title

dlc's picture
Submitted by dlc (not verified) on Thu, 05/02/2002 - 02:00.

What I expected from this article was how to use X, not code an X client. Change the title and you'll have an excellent resource (as how the article employs resources, not how an X user employs resources).

Re: Learning to Use X11

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 04/30/2002 - 02:00.

The author must be using Debian because he said the latest version of XFree86 is 4.1.0 not 4.2.0.

Re: Learning to Use X11

masinick's picture
Submitted by masinick (not verified) on Wed, 05/01/2002 - 02:00.

Stuff gets dated rather quickly. You're right, XFree86 does, indeed have 4.2.0 released, (and for all I know, they might even be past that now)! But 4.2.0 is new enough that only the latest distros are actually using it. For many vendors, their NEXT release will likely have 4.2.0 code, but 4.1.0 or even some 3.3.6 stuff is STILL pretty common, and not JUST for Debian-based systems, either.

XFreeGC

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 04/30/2002 - 02:00.

"We therefore explicitly free the allocated resources"

To be fussy, I guess we should call XFreeGC then also.

Looking forward for the next episode

servers and clients ... sure they are software

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 04/29/2002 - 02:00.

Well, clients and servers are still software-only ...

the problem is that some twisted host and server - doh!

And don't think i'm one of those grey-bearded veterans.

The first thing our information science teacher said about servers:

"Servers are software, not hardware" (He said that in german, but most of you prefare a sort of english i guess *g*)

So: no problem reading the x11-manual - at least not by twisting server and client, the rest ... *caught*

Spank me if i'm wrong!

Dear oh dear... "Server" and "Client" were *never* twisted!

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 04/30/2002 - 02:00.

If you think of the meaning of the words "server" and "client" it is difficult to get them confused, even when thinking in terms of X, instead of in terms of (say) a file server.

A "server" is something that provides a service. In the case of a file server, it is something that provides access to files over a network. In the case of X, the service provided is that of the drawing to the screen.

A "client" is something that requests the server to perform a task. In the case of the file server, it is requesting that a certain file be sent to it. In the case of X, it is asking the server to draw something to the screen.

Easy!

Re: Learning to Use X11

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 04/29/2002 - 02:00.

or a departmental server, connected to a larger number of (relatively dumb) X terminals.

Nope, that's wrong. Each X terminal would be a separate display (actually, separate host:display usually), not multiple screens. The dual- (or more) head example is a valid multi-screen example.

By the way, on Linux boxes at least, you can have multiple X displays running simultaneously (virtualized) by starting X from different virtual consoles (ie using ctrl-alt-F2 to log in, etc), by adding the display number (eg "startx -- :1"), the catch is that GNOME and KDE can't handle multiple instances of themselves on the same computer (you can run GNOME on one display and KDE on the other). Switch displays using ctrl-alt-F7, ctrl-alt-F8, etc.

Re: Learning to Use X11

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 04/29/2002 - 02:00.

Multiple instances for one user of the WindowMaker window manager are also not supported.

Re: Learning to Use X11

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 04/29/2002 - 02:00.

found the source, but you must do a

#include

rather than

#include

and you must use the following

g++ -I /usr/X11/include/X11 -L /usr/X11/lib -o x1 x1.cc -lX11

to compile on suse linux.

Re: Learning to Use X11

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 11/15/2003 - 03:00.

i make a program with C, and then compile it like this :

cc -g -o myprog myprog.c -lX11

but it is error in X11...!!

can anyone help me...? please..!
did i must configure somethink...to make it clear...?

i use suse 8.2, and i just install xdevel-xxx.rpm

Re: Learning to Use X11

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 04/30/2002 - 02:00.

it should read #include

Re: Learning to Use X11

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 04/29/2002 - 02:00.

Where is the difference between

#include and #include?

Magical whitespace?

Re: Learning to Use X11

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 04/29/2002 - 02:00.

I think the HTML of the original poster's comment got "filtered" by PHP nuke.

Re: Learning to Use X11

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 04/30/2002 - 02:00.

Yes, sure, but what is the file to #include between the

/ /

then? 8-)

#include or #include

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 04/22/2006 - 16:26.

#include <Xlib.h>
or
#include <X11/Xlib.h>

Re: Learning to Use X11

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 04/29/2002 - 02:00.

god I think my brain has frozen on monday morning, I found th e source, compiled it and it work!!!!!

doh!!

Re: Learning to Use X11

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 04/29/2002 - 02:00.

I'd like to give this a go? but where's the source luke?

Link

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 04/30/2002 - 02:00.

The paragraph titles are links, Jar-Jar. Click them with your favourite pointing device.

Me sah

jar Jar's picture
Submitted by jar Jar (not verified) on Fri, 10/06/2006 - 13:59.

Me sah no sah point divvy-sicer onna dee clikkers link.

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