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From: | Hyman Rosen |
Subject: | Re: Google to launch PC operating system |
Date: | Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:10:14 -0400 |
User-agent: | Thunderbird 2.0.0.21 (Windows/20090302) |
Alan Mackenzie wrote:
[1] KDE and Gnome are _not_ window managers.:-) OH YES THEY ARE!!! They perform the function that ratpoison or fvwm do, don't they? Or do you mean that I could run ratpoison as window manager, then start GNOME or KDE "I'm not a window manager" in it? I've never been too clear about this. I've never come across any clear explanation, and never been interested enough actively to seek it out.
The X Window Protocol has a SubstructureRedirect event that an X client can request to handle on a window. Only one client may have this event requested on a window - a second one who tries to request it fails. Window managers request this event for the root window; as a result, various attempts to do things to windows get mapped to requests sent to the window manager, which can do a variety of things with them. Thus, an X client program can see if there's a window manager already running by seeing whether its attempt to request SubstructureRedirect events succeeds or fails. Sufficiently clever clients can then run in two modes depending on this. I assume the KDE and GNOME environments might be such sufficiently clever programs.
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