1.9 The Role of Freedesktop.org
There??™s more to a desktop than just a display??”there??™s also sound, filesystem integration,
on-the-fly hardware discovery, and much more. All of these bases must be covered
in order to produce a desktop environment that can compete with commercial
offerings such as Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X.
Recognizing this, developers have rallied around freedesktop.org, creating an informal
consensus-building forum for desktop-oriented technologies. Freedesktop.org
(the web site address is the same as the project??™s name) hosts much of the work of
the revitalized X.org project, coordinates standards between Gnome and KDE, and
supports the development of complimentary technologies such as D-BUS and HAL.
freedesktop.org??™s lightweight organization and focus on collaboration have made it
the centerpiece for most desktop-oriented open source software development.
1.10 Display Hardware
Let??™s take a look at the hardware typically managed by an X server. It generally has
the following components:
??? Zero or more pointing devices (mice, trackballs, touchscreens).
??? Zero or more keyboards.
??? One or more video cards, each connected to one or more monitors.
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