16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unfortunate title, excellent book, January 14, 2008
This review is from: X Power Tools (Paperback)
This book exceeded my expectations logarithmically. The title should be something like "X Expertise" or "Everything you will ever need to know about X". Even the back cover text makes this sound rather uninteresting and dull, but trust me: it's not. This is well written and completely stuffed with information and tips. I thought I knew a bit about this subject - hah! I knew very little..
I loved the whole book, but I particularly loved the little asides the author threw in now and then, like "The memory and raw processing power of many modern optical mice exceeds that of the first computer to run Unix".
Chris Taylor explains things very well.. no, he does it better than that. So many things that I was a little vague on are now crystal clear - great job!
If you are using X at all, you want this. I had the big multi-volume "X Windows User's Guide" years ago (probably still have it kicking around here somewhere) - amazingly enough, Chris seems to have packed more truly useful information into 200+ pages than that did in several larger books.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Finally X explained, May 14, 2008
This review is from: X Power Tools (Paperback)
Ever since making Linux my primary OS of choice, I have found it impossible to find a cogent explanation of the different pieces of software that result in the graphical desktop. There are X, session managers, window managers, compositing managers, and desktop environments. Happily, this book explains these pieces of software, their purpose and the way they interact, and does it in a way that is accesible to the intermediate *nix user while still providing a satisfying amount of technical detail. It also provides tools for managing the software and tweaking it to make it do what you want.
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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great book except for modelines coverage, February 13, 2008
This review is from: X Power Tools (Paperback)
I have been using X11 with OpenBSD for at least 5 years now. I have
become knowledgeable about using KDE, less so about using X by itself.
This book filled in quite a few gaps in my knowledge of X, but it did not
provide me with the information I need to solve a problem making a new
monitor run at its rated maximum resolution.
I had been running with a 21" crt at 2048x1546, but the 9-year-old crt
was wearing out. So I bought a 19" ACER lcd display with maximum
resolution of 1440x900. The new display would not work at all with the
default xorg.conf generated by "X -configure". The problem turned out to
be the driver, which was specified as "ati". When I changed the driver
spec to "vesa", X came up at 1280x1024 and worked well. But I have so
far not been able to get the monitor to run in 1440x900.
The book does a pretty good job of explaining the xorg.conf file.
Modelines are mentioned briefly in the text, but not in the index. There
are no formulas given for computing modeline data to be included in the
xorg.conf file. No mention is made of the various values (eg ati, vesa)
that can be specified for X drivers. There is no list of validated modes
in the Xorg.0.log file. So after reading the book I still have not
figured out how to make my monitor run in 1440x900.
The book describes how to support keyboards for multiple countries, but
it was not clear to me after reading it how to display the corresponding
characters for (eg French,German,Russian) characters in addition to
English.
That said, I give the book a 4-star rating. There seems to be no other
current, up-to-date book on X. I'm glad I have a copy to study and write
notes in.
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