A windowing system is used by an operating systems to draw and move windows and other GUI elements. The default windowing system on OS X is the Quartz Compositor. The X Window System (X11) is a common windowing system for unix/linux operating systems that was packaged in OS X until Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8).
X11 is needed for running certain programs (Wireshark) and window managers (i3, awesome) that where built for it. Luckily we can install the now open source version of XQuartz to do so.
Prerequisites
This tutorial was done with the following versions:
- Mountain Lion (10.8.5)
- XQuartz (2.7.4)
This method should also work on OS X 10.9 - Mavericks.
Installation
1. Downlaod XQuartz from http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/
 |
| Mount XQuartz.dmg |
 |
| Run XQuartz.pkg |
4. Continue through the setup (defaults are fine)
 |
| Defaults are fine for installer |
5. The installer will prompt you about logging out and in again to make XQuartz your default X11 server. Click OK
 |
| Message by installer |
6. Once the installer has finished. Logout and Log back in again.
7. Start XQuartz
 |
| Lunchpad to open XQuartz |
8. You are now running the X Window System on OS X. xterm (a terminal application that runs on X11) will open by default.
 |
| xterm window |
Additional Information
To see other examples of applications running on X11 type the following into xterm:
- xeyes
- xclock
- xedit
- xlogo
- xcalc
To stop these applications press "ctrl + c" in the xterm window
All of these programs come bundled with XQuartz and are just some examples of programs that you can run using the X Window System.
End Notes
We can do some fun things now that we can X11 installed
- Click here for how to install Homebrew (a package manager)
- Click here for how to install MacPorts (a package manager)
- Click here for how to install a window manager (coming soon)
No comments:
Post a Comment