diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mail/chapter.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mail/chapter.sgml index 371eacaaf2..5ab047297e 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mail/chapter.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mail/chapter.sgml @@ -1,807 +1,816 @@ Bill Lloyd Original work by Jim Mock Rewritten by Electronic Mail Synopsis email electronic mail Electronic Mail, better known as email, is one of the most widely used forms of communication today. Millions of people use email every day, and chances are if you are reading this online, you fall into that category and probably even have more than one email address. Electronic Mail configuration is the subject of many System Administration books. If you plan on doing anything beyond setting up one mailhost for your network, you need industrial strength help. DNS Some parts of email configuration are controlled in the Domain Name System (DNS). If you are going to run your own DNS server, be sure to read through the files in /etc/namedb and man -k named. Using Electronic Mail POP IMAP There are five major parts involved in an email exchange. They are: the user program, the server daemon, DNS, a pop or IMAP daemon, and of course, the mailhost itself. The User Program This includes command line programs such as mutt, pine, elm, and mail, and GUI programs such as balsa, xfmail to name a few, and something more sophisticated like a WWW browser. These programs simply pass off the email transactions to the local mailhost, either by calling one of the server daemons available or delivering it over TCP. Mailhost Server Daemon mail server daemons sendmail mail server daemons postfix mail server daemons qmail mail server daemons exim This is usually sendmail (by default with FreeBSD) or one of the other mail server daemons such as qmail, postfix, or exim. There are others, but those are the most widely used. The server daemon usually has two functions—it looks after receiving incoming mail and delivers outgoing mail. It does not allow you to connect to it via POP or IMAP to read your mail. You need an additional daemon for that. Be aware that some older versions of sendmail have some serious security problems, however as long as you run a current version of it you should not have any problems. As always, it is a good idea to stay up-to-date with any software you run. Email and DNS The Domain Name System (DNS) and its daemon named play a large role in the delivery of email. In order to deliver mail from your site to another, the server daemon will look up the site in the DNS to determine the host that will receive mail for the destination. It works the same way when you have mail sent to you. The DNS contains the database mapping hostname to an IP address, and a hostname to mailhost. The IP address is specified in an A record. The MX (Mail eXchanger) record specifies the mailhost that will receive mail for you. If you do not have an MX record for your hostname, the mail will be delivered directly to your host. Receiving Mail email receiving Receiving mail for your domain is done by the mail host. It will collect mail sent to you and store it for reading or pickup. In order to pick the stored mail up, you will need to connect to the mail host. This is done by either using POP or IMAP. If you want to read mail directly on the mail host, then a POP or IMAP server is not needed. POP IMAP If you want to run a POP or IMAP server, there are two things you need to do: Get a POP or IMAP daemon from the ports collection and install it on your system. Modify /etc/inetd.conf to load the POP or IMAP server. The Mail Host mail host The mail host is the name given to a server that is responsible for delivering and receiving mail for your host, and possibly your network. + + + + Christopher + Shumway + Contributed by + + + <application>sendmail</application> Configuration sendmail &man.sendmail.8; is the default Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) in FreeBSD. sendmail's job is to accept mail from Mail User Agents (MUA) and deliver it to the appropriate mailer as defined by its configuration file. sendmail can also accept network connections and deliver mail to local mailboxes or deliver it to another program. sendmail uses the following configuration files: /etc/mail/access /etc/mail/aliases /etc/mail/local-host-names /etc/mail/mailer.conf /etc/mail/mailertable /etc/mail/sendmail.cf /etc/mail/virtusertable Filename Function /etc/mail/access sendmail access database file /etc/mail/aliases Mailbox aliases /etc/mail/local-host-names Lists of hosts sendmail accepts mail for /etc/mail/mailer.conf Mailer program configuration /etc/mail/mailertable Mailer delivery table /etc/mail/sendmail.cf sendmail master configuration file /etc/mail/virtusertable Virtual users and domain tables <filename>/etc/mail/access</filename> The access database defines what host(s) or IP addresses have access to the local mail server and what kind of access they have. Hosts can be listed as , , or simply passed to sendmail's error handling routine with a given mailer error. Hosts that are listed as , which is the default, are allowed to send mail to this host as long as the mail's final destination is the local machine. Hosts that are listed as are rejected for all mail connections. Hosts that have the option for their hostname are allowed to send mail for any destination through this mail server. Configuring the <application>sendmail</application> Access Database cyberspammer.com 550 We don't accept mail from spammers FREE.STEALTH.MAILER@ 550 We don't accept mail from spammers another.source.of.spam REJECT okay.cyberspammer.com OK 128.32 RELAY In this example we have five entries. Mail senders that match the left hand side of the table are affected by the action on the right side of the table. The first two examples give an error code to sendmail's error handling routine. The message is printed to the remote host when a mail matches the left hand side of the table. The next entry rejects mail from a specific host on the Internet, another.source.of.spam. The next entry accepts mail connections from a host okay.cyberspammer.com, which is more exact than the cyberspamer.com line above. More specific matches override less exact matches. The last entry allows relaying of electronic mail from hosts with an IP address that begins with 128.32. These hosts would be able to send mail through this mail server that are destined for other mail servers. When this file is updated, you need to run make in /etc/mail/ to update the database. <filename>/etc/mail/aliases</filename> The aliases database contains a list of virtual mailboxes that are expanded to other user(s), files, programs or other aliases. Here is a few examples that can be used in /etc/mail/aliases: Mail Aliases root: localuser ftp-bugs: joe,eric,paul bit.bucket: /dev/null procmail: "|/usr/local/bin/procmail" The aliases update matches the mailbox name on the left of the colon, and will expand it to the target(s) on the right. The first example simply expands the mailbox root to the mailbox localuser, which is then looked up again in the aliases database. If no match is found, then the message is delivered to the local user localuser. The next example shows a mail list. Mail to the mailbox ftp-bugs is expanded to the three local mailboxes joe, eric, and paul. Note that a remote mailbox could be specified as user@domain.com. The next example shows writing mail to a file, in this case /dev/null. The last example shows sending mail to a program, in this case the mail message is written to the standard input of /usr/local/bin/procmail through a Unix pipe. When this file is updated, you need to run make in /etc/mail/ to update the database. <filename>/etc/mail/local-host-names</filename> This is a list of hostnames &man.sendmail.8; is to accept as the local host name. Place any domains or hosts that sendmail is to be receiving mail for. For example, if this mail server was to accept mail for the domain example.com and the host mail.example.com, its local-host-names might look something like this: example.com mail.example.com When this file is updated, &man.sendmail.8; needs to be restarted for it to read the changes. <filename>/etc/mail/mailer.conf</filename> The mailer.conf configuration file holds a table containing the real mailer that is used for the given action. Very old software programs would hard-code in the name and path to the mailer, /usr/sbin/sendmail, which meant they where incompatible with other mailers such as postfix. Today, /usr/sbin/sendmail is a wrapper that looks at /etc/mail/mailer.conf and executes the correct binary. When another mail transfer agent is installed on the system, mailer.conf should be updated to reflect the correct programs to execute. <filename>/etc/mail/sendmail.cf</filename> sendmail's master configuration file, sendmail.cf controls the overall behavior of sendmail. Everything from rewriting e-mail addresses to printing reject messages for remote mail servers. Naturally, with such a diverse role, this configuration file is quite complex and its details are a bit out of the scope of this chapter. Fortunately, this file rarely needs to be changed for standard mail servers. The master sendmail configuration file can be built from &man.m4.1; macros that define features and behavior of sendmail. Please see /usr/src/contrib/sendmail/cf/README for some of the details. When changes to this file are made, sendmail needs to be restarted for the changes to take effect. <filename>/etc/mail/virtusertable</filename> The virtualusertable maps mail for virtual domains and mailboxes to real mailboxes. These mail boxes can be local, remote, point to an alias defined in /etc/mail/aliases or to a file. Example Virtual Domain Mail Map root@example.com root postmaster@example.com postmaster@noc.example.net @example.com joe In the above example, we have a mapping for a domain example.com. This file is processed in a first match order down the file. The first item, maps root@example.com to the local mailbox root. The next entry maps postmaster@example.com to the mailbox postmaster on the host noc.example.net. Finally, if nothing from example.com has matched so far, it will match the last mapping, which matches every other mail message addressed to someone at example.com. This will be mapped to the local mail box joe. Troubleshooting email troubleshooting Why do I have to use the FQDN for hosts on my site? You will probably find that the host is actually in a different domain; for example, if you are in foo.bar.edu and you wish to reach a host called mumble in the bar.edu domain, you will have to refer to it by the fully-qualified domain name, mumble.bar.edu, instead of just mumble. BIND Traditionally, this was allowed by BSD BIND resolvers. However the current version of BIND that ships with FreeBSD no longer provides default abbreviations for non-fully qualified domain names other than the domain you are in. So an unqualified host mumble must either be found as mumble.foo.bar.edu, or it will be searched for in the root domain. This is different from the previous behavior, where the search continued across mumble.bar.edu, and mumble.edu. Have a look at RFC 1535 for why this was considered bad practice, or even a security hole. As a good workaround, you can place the line: search foo.bar.edu bar.edu instead of the previous: domain foo.bar.edu into your /etc/resolv.conf. However, make sure that the search order does not go beyond the boundary between local and public administration, as RFC 1535 calls it. sendmail says mail loops back to myself This is answered in the sendmail FAQ as follows: * I am getting Local configuration error messages, such as: 553 relay.domain.net config error: mail loops back to myself 554 <user@domain.net>... Local configuration error How can I solve this problem? You have asked mail to the domain (e.g., domain.net) to be forwarded to a specific host (in this case, relay.domain.net) by using an MX record, but the relay machine does not recognize itself as domain.net. Add domain.net to /etc/sendmail.cw (if you are using FEATURE(use_cw_file)) or add Cw domain.net to /etc/sendmail.cf. The sendmail FAQ is in /usr/src/usr.sbin/sendmail and is recommended reading if you want to do any tweaking of your mail setup. PPP How can I do email with a dial-up PPP host? You want to connect a FreeBSD box on a lan, to the Internet. The FreeBSD box will be a mail gateway for the lan. The PPP connection is non-dedicated. There are at least two ways to do this. UUCP The other is to use UUCP. The key is to get a Internet site to provide secondary MX service for your domain. For example: bigco.com. MX 10 bigco.com. MX 20 smalliap.com. Only one host should be specified as the final recipient (add Cw bigco.com in /etc/sendmail.cf on bigco.com). When the senders' sendmail is trying to deliver the mail it will try to connect to you over the modem link. It will most likely time out because you are not online. sendmail will automatically deliver it to the secondary MX site, i.e., your Internet provider. The secondary MX site will try every (sendmail_flags = -bd -q15m in /etc/rc.conf) 15 minutes to connect to your host to deliver the mail to the primary MX site. You might want to use something like this as a login script. #!/bin/sh # Put me in /usr/local/bin/pppbigco ( sleep 60 ; /usr/sbin/sendmail -q ) & /usr/sbin/ppp -direct pppbigco If you are going to create a separate login script for a user you could use sendmail -qRbigco.com instead in the script above. This will force all mail in your queue for bigco.com to be processed immediately. A further refinement of the situation is as follows. Message stolen from the &a.isp;. > we provide the secondary MX for a customer. The customer connects to > our services several times a day automatically to get the mails to > his primary MX (We do not call his site when a mail for his domains > arrived). Our sendmail sends the mailqueue every 30 minutes. At the > moment he has to stay 30 minutes online to be sure that all mail is > gone to the primary MX. > > Is there a command that would initiate sendmail to send all the mails > now? The user has not root-privileges on our machine of course. In the privacy flags section of sendmail.cf, there is a definition Opgoaway,restrictqrun Remove restrictqrun to allow non-root users to start the queue processing. You might also like to rearrange the MXs. We are the 1st MX for our customers like this, and we have defined: # If we are the best MX for a host, try directly instead of generating # local config error. OwTrue That way a remote site will deliver straight to you, without trying the customer connection. You then send to your customer. Only works for hosts, so you need to get your customer to name their mail machine customer.com as well as hostname.customer.com in the DNS. Just put an A record in the DNS for customer.com. Advanced Topics The following section covers more involved topics such as mail configuration and setting up mail for your entire domain. Basic Configuration email configuration Out of the box, you should be able to send email to external hosts as long as you have set up /etc/resolv.conf or are running your own name server. If you would like to have mail for your host delivered to that specific host, there are two methods: Run your own name server and have your own domain. For example, FreeBSD.org Get mail delivered directly to your host. This is done by delivering mail directly to the current DNS name for your machine. For example, example.FreeBSD.org. SMTP Regardless of which of the above you choose, in order to have mail delivered directly to your host, you must have a permanent (static) IP address (no dynamic PPP dial-up). If you are behind a firewall, it must pass SMTP traffic on to you. If you want to receive mail at your host itself, you need to be sure of one of two things: MX record Make sure that the MX record in your DNS points to your host's IP address. Make sure there is no MX entry in your DNS for your host. Either of the above will allow you to receive mail directly at your host. Try this: &prompt.root; hostname example.FreeBSD.org &prompt.root; host example.FreeBSD.org example.FreeBSD.org has address 204.216.27.XX If that is what you see, mail directly to yourlogin@example.FreeBSD.org should work without problems. If instead you see something like this: &prompt.root; host example.FreeBSD.org example.FreeBSD.org has address 204.216.27.XX example.FreeBSD.org mail is handled (pri=10) by hub.FreeBSD.org All mail sent to your host (example.FreeBSD.org) will end up being collected on hub under the same username instead of being sent directly to your host. The above information is handled by your DNS server. The DNS record that carries mail routing information is the Mail eXchange entry. If no MX record exists, mail will be delivered directly to the host by way of its IP address. The MX entry for freefall.FreeBSD.org at one time looked like this: freefall MX 30 mail.crl.net freefall MX 40 agora.rdrop.com freefall MX 10 freefall.FreeBSD.org freefall MX 20 who.cdrom.com As you can see, freefall had many MX entries. The lowest MX number is the host that ends up receiving the mail in the end while the others will queue mail temporarily if freefall is busy or down. Alternate MX sites should have separate Internet connections from your own in order to be the most useful. Your ISP or other friendly site should have no problem providing this service for you. Mail for Your Domain In order to set up a mailhost (a.k.a., mail server) you need to have any mail sent to various workstations directed to it. Basically, you want to hijack any mail for your domain (in this case *.FreeBSD.org) and divert it to your mail server so your users can check their mail via POP or directly on the server. DNS To make life easiest, a user account with the same username should exist on both machines. Use adduser to do this. The mailhost you will be using must be the designated mail exchange for each workstation on the network. This is done in your DNS configuration like so: example.FreeBSD.org A 204.216.27.XX ; Workstation MX 10 hub.FreeBSD.org ; Mailhost This will redirect mail for the workstation to the mailhost no matter where the A record points. The mail is sent to the MX host. You cannot do this yourself unless you are running a DNS server. If you are not, or cannot, run your own DNS server, talk to your ISP or whoever does your DNS for you. If you're doing virtual email hosting, the following information will come in handy. For the sake of an example, we will assume you have a customer with their own domain, in this case customer1.org and you want all the mail for customer1.org sent to your mailhost, which is named mail.myhost.com. The entry in your DNS should look like this: customer1.org MX 10 mail.myhost.com You do not need an A record if you only want to handle email for the domain. Be aware that this means pinging customer1.org will not work unless an A record exists for it. The last thing that you must do is tell sendmail on your mailhost what domains and/or hostnames it should be accepting mail for. There are a few different ways this can be done. Either of the following will work: Add the hosts to your /etc/sendmail.cw file if you are using the FEATURE(use_cw_file). If you are using sendmail 8.10 or higher, the file is /etc/mail/local-host-names. Add a Cwyour.host.com line to your /etc/sendmail.cf or /etc/mail/sendmail.cf if you are using sendmail 8.10 or higher. diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x11/chapter.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x11/chapter.sgml index 94132b99e4..aba8438f75 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x11/chapter.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x11/chapter.sgml @@ -1,1393 +1,1394 @@ The X Window System Synopsis FreeBSD uses XFree86 to provide users with a powerful graphical user interface. XFree86 is a open-source implementation of the X Window System. The following chapter will cover installation and configuration of XFree86 on your FreeBSD system. For more information on X11 and to see whether your video card is supported, check the XFree86 web site. After reading this chapter you will know: How to install and configure XFree86. The various components of the X window system, and how they interoperate How to install and use different window managers How to use TrueType fonts in XFree86 How to setup your system for graphical logins (XDM). Before reading this chapter you should: Know how to install additional third-party software () Installing XFree86 XFree86 is available as a port and as a package, making it easy to install. You can also download the binaries directly from the XFree86 organization and install them by hand, following the instructions provided by the XFree86 group. Your only decision is which version of XFree86 to run. XFree86 3.X is the maintenance branch of XFree86 development. It's very stable, and it supports a huge number of graphics cards. However, no new development is happening there. XFree86 4.X is a redesign of XFree86. As well as introducing many new features (including much better support for fonts and anti-aliasing), XFree86 4.X supports slightly fewer graphics cards. If your card is supported we recommend you run 4.X. If it is not then run 3.X. The rest of this chapter will explain how to configure XFree86, and suggest various programs for X that you might want to try. - - Christopher - Shumway - - + + Christopher + Shumway + Contributed by + + XFree86 Configuration Introduction This chapter will introduce the steps necessary to install and configure the XFree86 X Windows System under FreeBSD. Once the server is installed and configured properly. The user can read to setup their desktop environment. XFree86 4.X XFree86 Before You Start Before the user is to start configuration of XFree86-4, the the following information will need to be known about the target system: Monitor specifications Video Adapter chipset Video Adapter memory horizontal scan rate vertical scan rate The specifications for the target system's monitor are used by XFree86 to determine the resolution and refresh rate to run at. These specifications can usually be obtained from the documentation that came with the target system's monitor or from the manufacturer's website. There are two ranges of numbers that are needed, the horizontal scan rate and the vertical synchronization rate. The video adapter's chipset defines what driver module XFree86 uses to talk to the graphics hardware. With most chipsets, this can be automatically determined, but it is still useful to know in case the automatic detection doesn't work correctly. Video memory on the graphic adapter determines the resolution and color depth the target system can run at. This is important to know so the user knows the limitations of the target system. Installing XFree86 4.X Software XFree86 4 can be installed using the FreeBSD ports system or using &man.pkg.add.1;. If the user is building XFree86-4 from source and has USA_RESIDENT set in /etc/make.conf, the user may first have to fetch Wraphelp.c if XDM-AUTHORIZATION-1 support is desired. This file is to be placed in the port's files/ sub-directory before the port is built. Configuring XFree86 4.X Configuration of XFree86 4.X is a several step process. The first step is to build an initial configuration file with the configure option to XFree86. As the super user, simply run: &prompt.root; XFree86 -configure This will generate a skeleton XFree86 configuration file in the current working directory called XF86Config.new. The XFree86 program will attempt to probe the graphics hardware on the system and will write a configuration file to load the proper drivers for the detected hardware on the target system. The next step is to test the currently existing configuration to verify that XFree86 can work with the graphics hardware on the target system. To preform this task, the user needs to run: &prompt.root; XFree86 -xf86config XF86Config.new If the user is presented with a black and grey grid and an X mouse cursor, then the configuration was successful. To exit the test, just press ctrl, alt and backspace simultaneously. XFree86 4 Tuning Next, the user needs to tune the XF86Config.new configuration file to their personal taste. Open up the file in a text editor such as &man.emacs.1; or &man.ee.1;. The first thing the user will want to do is add the frequencies for the target system's monitor. These are usually expressed as a horizontal and vertical synchronization rate. These values are added to the XF86Config.new file under the "Monitor" section as such: Section "Monitor" Identifier "Monitor0" VendorName "Monitor Vendor" ModelName "Monitor Model" Horizsync 30-107 VertRefresh 48-120 EndSection The Horizsync and VertRefresh keywords may not exist in the user's configuration file. If they do not, they need to be added, with the correct horizontal synchronization rate placed after the Horizsync keyword and the vertical synchronization rate after the VertRefresh keyword. In the example above the target monitor's rates where entered. XF86Config While the XF86Config.new configuration file is still open in an editor, next the user needs to select what the default resolution and color depth is desired. This is defined in the Screen section. Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Device "Card0" Monitor "Monitor0" DefaultColorDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Depth 24 Modes "1024x768" EndSubSection EndSection The DefaultColorDepth keyword describes the color depth the user wishes to run at by default. This can be overridden with the -bpp command line switch to XFree86 1. The Modes keyword describes the resolution the user wishes to run at for the given color depth. In the example above, the default color depth is twenty four bits per pixel. At this color depth, the accepted resolution is one thousand twenty four pixels by seven hundred and sixty eight pixels. If a user wants to run at a resolution of one thousand twenty four pixels by seven hundred sixty eight pixels at twenty four bits per pixel, then the user needs to add the DefaultColorDepth keyword with the value of twenty four, and add to the "Display" subsection with the desired Depth the Modes keyword with the resolution the user wishes to run at. Note that only VESA standard modes are supported as defined by the target system's graphics hardware. Finally, the user can write out the configuration file and test it using the test mode given above. If all is well, then the configuration file needs to be installed in a common location where XFree86 1 can source it in the future. This is typically /etc/X11/XF86Config or /usr/X11R6/etc/X11/XF86Config. &prompt.root; cp XF86Config.new /etc/X11/XF86Config Once the configuration file has been placed in a common location, XFree86 can then be used through &man.xdm.1;. In order to use startx 1 the user will have to install the X11/wrapper port. Advanced Configuration Topics Configuration with Intel i810 Graphics Chipsets Intel i810 graphic chipset Configuration with Intel i810 integrated chipsets requires the agpgart AGP programming interface for XFree86 to be able to drive the card. To enable the agpgart programming interface, the agp.ko kernel loadable module needs to be loaded into the kernel with &man.kldload.8;. This can be done automatically with the &man.loader.8;. Simply add this line to /boot/loader.conf to have the loader load agp.ko at boot time: agp_load="YES" Next, a device node needs to be created for the programming interface. To create the AGP device node, run &man.MAKEDEV.8; in the /dev directory as such: &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; sh MAKEDEV agpgart This will allow the user to configure the graphics hardware as any other graphics board. Understanding X If you are familiar with using windowing systems that ship with other operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows, or MacOS, then you may find your first introduction to X to be something of a culture shock. Today, as Unix desktop environments such as KDE and GNOME become more prevalent it is less necessary to understand all the behind-the-scenes interaction between the various X components, or what those components actually are. However, one of X's strengths is its underlying design, which lends a great deal of flexibility, and makes it possible to do things with X that are impossible with other, more rigid, systems. Why X? X is not the first window system written for Unix, but it is the most popular. X's original development team had worked on another window system before writing X. That system's name was W (for Window, obviously). X is just the next letter in the Roman alphabet. X can be referred to variously as X, X Window System, X11, and other terms. X Windows is to be avoided wherever possible; see &man.X.1; for more information. The X Client/Server Model X was designed from the beginning to be network-centric, and adopts a client-server model. In the X model, the X server runs on the computer that has the keyboard, monitor, and mouse attached. The server is responsible for managing the display, handling input from the keyboard and mouse, and so on. Each X application (such as XTerm, or Netscape) is a client. A client sends messages to the server such as Please draw a window at these coordinates, and the server sends back messages such as The user just clicked on your OK button. If you are using FreeBSD in a home or small office environment where you only have one computer then you will be running the X server and the X clients on the same computer. However, if you have many machines running FreeBSD it is perfectly possible to run the X server on the computer by your desk (which might be quite a low specification machine) and run your X applications (the clients) on the powerful expensive server that serves your office. In this scenario the communication between the X client and server takes place over the network. This confuses a lot of people, because the X terminology is exactly backward to what they expect. They expect the X server to be the big powerful machine down the hall, and the X client to be the machine on their desk. As long as you remember that the X server is the machine with the monitor and keyboard, and the X clients are the programs that display the windows you will not get confused. There is an interesting side-effect to this design. There is nothing in the forces the client and server machines to be running the same operating system, or even to be running on the same type of computer. It is perfectly feasible to run an X server on Microsoft Windows or Apple's MacOS, and there are various free and commercial applications available that do exactly that. The X server that ships with FreeBSD is called XFree86, and is available for free, under a license very similar to the FreeBSD license. Commercial X servers for FreeBSD are also available, should you want one. The Window Manager The X design philosophy is much like the Unix design philosophy, tools, not policy. By this we mean that X (and Unix) does not try to dictate to the end user how they should accomplish whatever task they are trying to solve. Instead, they aim to provide the user tools to do the job, and it is the user's responsibility to decide how to use those tools. This philosophy extends to X not dictating what windows should look like on screen, how you move them around with your mouse, what keystrokes you should use to move between windows (i.e., Alt Tab , if you are familiar with Windows), what the title bars on each window should look like, whether or not they have close buttons on them, and so on. Instead, X delegates this responsibility to an application called the Window Manager. There are dozens of window managers available for X; AfterStep, Enlightenment, ctwm, ftwm, sawfish, twm, WindowMaker and more. Each of these window managers provides a different look and feel; some of them support virtual desktops some of them allow you to completely customize the keystrokes you can use to manage your desktop; some have a Start button, or similar device; some are themeable, allowing you to completely change the look-and-feel of your desktop by applying a new theme. These window managers, and many more, are available in the x11-wm category of the Ports Collection. In addition, the KDE and GNOME desktop environments both have their own window managers which integrate tightly with the desktop, although both of them allow you to replace the default window manager with your own choice. Each window manager also has a different configuration mechanism; some expect you to write a configuration file by hand; others feature GUI tools for carrying most of the configuration tasks; at least one (sawfish) has a configuration file written in a dialect of the Lisp language, which is very powerful (if you are in to that sort of thing). As you can imagine, this flexibility comes with a price. It can be very difficult for documents such as this one to guide you through choosing and configuring a window manager because the available choice is so wide. Focus Policy Another feature the window manager is responsible for is the mouse focus policy. Each windowing system, be it X, Microsoft Windows, or some other has an abstraction called the focus, and at any one time only one window can have the focus. The window that has the focus is the window that will receive all your keypresses and mouse clicks. You are probably familiar with a focus policy commonly called click-to-focus. This means that you must click on the window you want to have the focus. The window may then come to the top of the stack, and all your keypresses will now be directed to this window, even if you move the mouse outside the window. To give the focus to another window you must first click in it. X does not support any particular focus policy. Instead, the window manager controls which window has the focus at any one time. Different window managers will support different focus methods. All of them support click to focus, and the majority of them support several others. The two other most popular focus policies are: focus-follows-mouse With this policy, the window that is under the mouse pointer is the window that has the focus. This may not necessarily be the window that is on top of all the other windows. You can change the focus by pointing at another window, there is no need to click in it as well. After getting used to this policy it can be very disorientating going back to another system that uses click-to-focus. sloppy-focus This policy is a small extension to focus-follows-mouse. With focus-follows-mouse, if you move the mouse over the background (or desktop, also called the root window) then no window has the focus, and your keypresses go nowhere. If you use sloppy-focus and move the mouse pointer on the root window then the last window that had the focus will keep it. Your window manager will almost certainly support other policies, and variations on these two, so make sure you read the documentation it is supplied with. Widgets The X approach of providing tools and not policy extends to the widgets that you see on screen in each application. Widget is a GUI term for all the items in the user interface that you can click on and manipulate in some way; buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, icons, lists, and so on. Microsoft Windows Developer documentation calls these things controls. Microsoft Windows and Apple's MacOS both have a very rigid widget policy. Application developers are supposed to ensure that their applications share a common look and feel. X was designed long before either of these windowing systems, when research into GUI systems was in its infancy, and it was felt that it would not be sensible to mandate a particular graphical style, or set of widgets that have to be adhered to. If you examine the evolution of the Windows or MacOS GUI over the past ten years you will see many examples of how the interfaces have been altered over time to reflect new thinking in the art of Human/Computer Interaction. The upshot of this is that you can not expect X applications to have a common look and feel. There are several popular widget sets (and variations), including the original Athena widget set (developed at MIT), Motif (on which the widget set in Microsoft Windows was modeled, all bevelled edges and three shades of grey), OpenLook, and others. Most newer X applications today will use a modern-looking widget set, probably either Qt, used by KDE, or GTK, used by the GNOME project. In this respect we are beginning to see a convergence in look-and-feel on the Unix desktop, which certainly makes things easier for the novice user. However, the sudden rise in popularity of theming, where window managers make it possible to dramatically personally your desktop and alter the look and feel of the widgets risks confusing the issue once more. Murray Stokely Section on fonts by Using Fonts in XFree86 Type1 Fonts The default fonts that ship with XFree86 are less than ideal for typical desktop publishing applications. Large presentation fonts show up jagged and unprofessional looking and small fonts in Netscape are almost completely unintelligible. However, there are several free, high quality Type1 (PostScript) fonts available which can be readily used with XFree86, either version 3.X or version 4.X. For instance, the URW font collection (x11-fonts/urwfonts) includes high quality versions of standard type1 fonts (Times Roman, Helvetica, Palatino and others). The Freefont collection (x11-fonts/freefont) includes many more fonts, but most of them are intended for use in graphics software such as the Gimp, and are not complete enough to serve as screen fonts. In addition, XFree86 can be configured to use TrueType fonts with a minimum of effort: see the section on TrueType fonts later. To install the above Type1 font collections from the ports collection you can run the following commands. &prompt.root; cd /usr/ports/x11-fonts/urwfonts &prompt.root; make install clean And likewise with the freefont or other collections. To tell the X server that these fonts exist, you can add an appropriate line to your XF86Config file (in /etc/ for XFree86 version 3, or in /etc/X11/ for version 4), which reads: FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/URW/" Alternatively, at the command line in your X session you can write: &prompt.user; xset fp+ /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/URW &prompt.user; xset fp rehash This will work but will be lost when you log out from this session, unless you add it to your startup file (~/.xinitrc for a normal startx session, or ~/.xsession when logging in through a graphical login manager like XDM). A third way is to use the new XftConfig file: see the section on anti-aliasing, later. TrueType Fonts XFree86 4.0 has built in support for rendering TrueType fonts. There are two different modules that can enable this functionality. The "freetype" module is used in this example because it is more consistent with the other font rendering back-ends. To enable the freetype module just add the following line to the module section of your /etc/X11/XF86Config file. Load "freetype" For XFree86 3.3.X you will need to run a separate TrueType font server. Xfstt is commonly used for this purpose. To install x11-servers/Xfstt on your FreeBSD system simply install the port from /usr/ports/x11-servers/Xfstt You should now make a directory for your TrueType fonts (e.g. /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType) and copy all of your TrueType fonts into this directory. Keep in mind that you cannot take TrueType fonts directly from a Macintosh; they must be in Unix/DOS/Windows format for use by XFree86. Once you have copied the files into this directory you need to use ttmkfdir to create a fonts.dir file so that the X font renderer knows that you've installed these new files. There is a FreeBSD port for x11-fonts/ttmkfdir in /usr/ports/x11-fonts/ttmkfdir. &prompt.root; cd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType &prompt.root; ttmkfdir > fonts.dir Now you need to add your TrueType directory to your fonts path. This is just the same as described above for Type1 fonts, that is, use &prompt.user; xset fp+ /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType &prompt.user; xset fp rehash or add a line to the XF86Config file. That's it. Now Netscape, Gimp, StarOffice, and all of your other X applications should now recognize your installed TrueType fonts. Extremely small fonts (as with text in a high resolution display on a web page) and extremely large fonts (within StarOffice) will look much better now. Anti-Aliasing Your Fonts Starting with version 4.0.2, XFree86 supports anti-aliased fonts. Currently, most software has not been updated to take advantage of this new functionality. However, Qt (the toolkit for the KDE desktop) does; so if you are running XFree86 4.0.2 (or higher), Qt 2.3 (or higher) and KDE, all your KDE/Qt applications can be made to use anti-aliased fonts. To configure anti-aliasing, you need to create (or edit, if it already exists) the file /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XftConfig. Several advanced things can be done with this file; this section describes only the simplest possibilities. First, you need to tell the X server about the fonts which you want anti-aliased. To do that, for each font directory you have a line, which looks like this: dir "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/Type1" And likewise for the other font directories (URW, truetype, etc) containing fonts you'd like anti-aliased. Anti-aliasing makes sense only for scalable fonts (basically, Type1 and TrueType) so don't include bitmap font directories here. The directories which you included here can now be commented out of your XF86Config file. Next, you may not want to anti-alias normal-sized text. (Antialiasing makes borders slightly fuzzy, which makes very small text more readable and removes "staircases" from large text, but can cause eyestrain if applied to normal text.) To exclude point sizes between 9 and 13 from anti-aliasing, include these lines: match any size > 8 any size < 14 edit antialias = false; You may also find that the spacing for some monospaced fonts gets messed up when you turn on anti-aliasing. This seems to be an issue with KDE, in particular. One possible fix for this is to force the spacing for such fonts to be 100: add the following lines: match any family == "fixed" edit family =+ "mono"; match any family == "console" edit family =+ "mono"; (this aliases the other common names for fixed fonts as "mono"), and then add: match any family == "mono" edit spacing = 100; Supposing you want to use the Lucidux fonts whenever monospaced fonts are required (these look nice, and don't seem to suffer from the spacing problem), you could replace that last line with these: match any family == "mono" edit family += "LuciduxMono"; match any family == "Lucidux Mono" edit family += "LuciduxMono"; match any family == "LuciduxMono" edit family =+ "Lucidux Mono"; (the last lines alias different equivalent family names). Finally, you want to allow users to add commands to this file, via their personal .xftconfig files. To do this, add a last line: includeif "~/.xftconfig" That's all; anti-aliasing should be enabled the next time you start the X server. However, note that your programs must know how to take advantage of it. At the present time, the toolkit Qt does, so the entire KDE environment can use anti-aliased fonts (see on KDE for details); there are patches for gtk+ to do the same, so if compiled against such a patched gtk+, the GNOME environment and Mozilla can also use anti-aliased fonts. Anti-aliasing is still new to FreeBSD and XFree86; configuring it should get easier with time, and it will soon be supported by many more applications. Seth Kingsley Section on XDM by The X Display Manager Overview The X Display Manager (XDM) is an optional part of the X Window System that is used for login session management. This is useful for several types of situations, including minimal X Terminals (see ), desktops, and large network display servers. Since the X Window System is network and protocol independent, there are a wide variety of possible configurations for running X clients and servers on different machines connected by a network. XDM provides a graphical interface for choosing which display server to connect to, and entering authorization information such as a login and password combination. You may think of XDM as providing the same functionality to the user as the &man.getty.8; utility (see for details). That is, it performs system logins to the display being connected to and then runs a session manager on behalf of the user (usually an X window manager). XDM then waits for this program to exit, signaling that the user is done and should be logged out of the display. At this point, XDM can display the login and display chooser screens for the next user to login. Using XDM The XDM daemon program is located in /usr/X11R6/bin/xdm. You can run this program at any time as root and it will start managing the X display on the local machine. If you want XDM to run in the background every time the machine boots up, a convenient way to do this is by adding an entry to /etc/ttys. For more information about the format and usage of this file, see . There is a line in the default /etc/ttys file for running the XDM daemon on a virtual terminal: ttyv8 "/usr/X11R6/bin/xdm -nodaemon" xterm off secure By default this entry is disabled, and in order to enable it you will need to change field 5 from off to on and then restart &man.init.8; using the directions in . The first field, the name of the terminal this program will manage, is ttyv8. This means that XDM will start running on the 9th virtual terminal. Configuring XDM The XDM configuration directory is located in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm. In this directory you will see several files used to change the behavior and appearance of XDM. Typically you will find these files: File Description Xaccess Client authorization ruleset. Xresources Default X resource values. Xservers List of remote and local displays to manage. Xsession Default session script for logins. Xsetup_* xdm-config Global configuration for all displays running on this machine. xdm-errors Errors generated by the server program. xdm-pid The process ID of the currently running XDM. Also in this directory are a few scripts and programs used to setup the desktop when XDM is running. In the next few sections I will briefly describe the purpose of each of these files. The exact syntax and usage of all of these files is described in &man.xdm.1; The default configuration is a simple rectangular login window with the hostname of the machine displayed at the top in a large font and Login: and Password: prompts below. This is a good starting point if you are planning to design your own look and feel for the XDM screens. Xaccess The protocol for connecting to XDM controlled displays is called the X Display Manager Connection Protocol (XDMCP). This file is basically just a ruleset for controlling XDMCP connections from remote machines. By default, it allows any client to connect, but you will see this will not matter because the default xdm-config file does not listen for remote connections. Xresources This is an application-defaults file for the display chooser and the login screens. This is where you can customize the appearance of the login program. The format is identical to the app-defaults file described in the XFree86 documentation. Xservers This is a list of the remote displays the chooser should provide as choices. Xsession This is the default session script for XDM to run after a user has logged in. Normally each user will have a customized session script in ~/.xsessionrc that overrides this script. Xsetup_* These files contain scripts that will be run automatically before displaying the chooser or login interfaces. There is a script for each display being used, named Xsetup_followed by the local display number (for instance Xsetup_0). Typically these scripts will run one or two programs in the background such as xconsole. xdm-config This file contains settings in the form of app-defaults that are applicable to every display that this installation manages. xdm-errors This file contains the output of the X servers that XDM is trying to run. If a display that XDM is trying to start hangs for some reason, this is a good place to look for error messages. These messages are also written to the user's ~/.xsession-errors file on a per-session basis Running a Network Display Server In order for other clients to connect to your display server, you will need to edit the access control rules, and enable the connection listener. By default these are set to conservative values, which is a good decision security-wise. To get XDM to listen for connections first comment out a line in the xdm-config file: ! SECURITY: do not listen for XDMCP or Chooser requests ! Comment out this line if you want to manage X terminals with xdm DisplayManager.requestPort: 0 and then restart XDM. Remember that comments in app-defaults files begin with a ! character, not a #. After this, you may need to put more strict access controls in place. Look at the example entries in Xaccess file, and refer to the &man.xdm.1; manual page. Replacements for XDM Several replacements for the default XDM program exist. One of them, KDM (bundled with KDE) is described in a later section. Apart from various visual improvements and cosmetic frills, it can be easily configured to let users choose their window manager of choice at the time they log in. Valentino Vaschetto Contributed by Desktop Environments This section describes the different desktop environments available for X-Windows on FreeBSD. For our purposes a "desktop environment" will mean anything ranging from a simple window manager, to a complete suite of desktop applications such as KDE or GNOME. GNOME About GNOME GNOME is a user-friendly desktop environment that enables users to easily use and configure their computers. GNOME includes a panel (for starting applications and displaying status), a desktop (where data and applications can be placed), a set of standard desktop tools and applications, and a set of conventions that make it easy for applications to cooperate and be consistent with each other. Users of other operating systems or environments should feel right at home using the powerful graphics-driven environment that GNOME provides. Installing GNOME To install GNOME from the network, simply type: &prompt.root; pkg_add -r gnome If you would rather build GNOME from source, then use the ports tree: &prompt.root; cd /usr/ports/x11/gnome &prompt.root; make install clean Once GNOME is installed, we must have the X server start GNOME instead of a default window manager. If you have already customized your .xinitrc file then you should simply replace the line that starts your current window manager with one that starts /usr/X11R6/bin/gnome-session instead. If you haven't added anything special to your configuration file, then it is enough to simply type: &prompt.root; echo "/usr/X11R6/bin/gnome-session" > ~/.xinitrc That's it. Type startx and you will be in the GNOME desktop environment. If you're running a display manager like XDM, this will not work. Instead, you should create an executable .xsession file with the same command in it. To do this, edit your file (if you already have one) and replace the existing window manager command with /usr/X11R6/bin/gnome-session; or else, &prompt.root; echo "#!/bin/sh" > ~/.xsession &prompt.root; echo "/usr/X11R6/bin/gnome-session" >> ~/.xsession &prompt.root; chmod +x ~/.xsession Another option is to configure your display manager to allow choosing the window manager at login time; the section on KDE2 details explains how to do this for kdm, the display manager of KDE. KDE2 About KDE2 KDE is an easy to use contemporary desktop environment. Some of the things that KDE brings to the user are: A beautiful contemporary desktop A desktop exhibiting complete network transparency An integrated help system allowing for convenient, consistent access to help on the use of the KDE desktop and its applications Consistent look and feel of all KDE applications Standardized menu and toolbars, keybindings, color-schemes, etc. Internationalization: KDE is available in more than 40 languages Centralized consisted dialog driven desktop configuration A great number of useful KDE applications KDE has an office application suite based on KDE's KParts technology consisting of a spread-sheet, a presentation application, an organizer, a news client and more. KDE is also comes with a web browser called Konqeuror, which represents already a solid competitor to other existing web browsers on Unix systems. More information on KDE can be found on the KDE website Installing KDE2 At the time of writing, a package for kde2 doesn't exist yet. No problem! The ports tree hides all the complexity of building a package from source. To install KDE2, do this : &prompt.root; cd /usr/ports/x11/kde2 &prompt.root; make install clean This command will fetch all the necessary files from the Internet, configure and compile KDE2, install the applications, and then clean up after itself. Now you're going to have to tell the X server to launch KDE2 instead of a default window manager. Do this by typing this: &prompt.root; echo "/usr/X11R6/bin/startkde" > ~/.xinitrc Now, whenever you go into X-Windows, KDE2 will be your desktop. (Note: this will not work if you're logging in via a display manager like xdm. In that case you have two options: create an .xsession file as described in the section on GNOME, but with the /usr/X11R6/bin/startkde command instead of the gnome-session command; or, configure your display manager to allow choosing a desktop at login time. Below it is explained how to do this for kdm, KDE's display manager.) More Details on KDE2 Now that KDE2 is installed on your system, you'll find that you can learn a lot from its help pages, or just by pointing and clicking at various menus. Windows or Mac users will feel quite at home. The best reference for KDE is the on-line documentation. KDE comes with its own web browser, Konqueror, dozens of useful applications, and extensive documentation. This section only discusses somewhat technical things which are difficult to learn just by random exploration. The KDE display manager If you're an administrator on a multi-user system, you may like to have a graphical login screen to welcome users. You can use xdm, as described earlier. However, KDE includes an alternative, KDM, which is designed to look more attractive and include more login-time options. In particular, users can easily choose (via a menu) which desktop environment (KDE2, GNOME, or something else) to run after logging on. If you're slightly adventurous and you want this added flexibility and visual appeal, read on. To begin with, run the KDE2 control panel, kcontrol, as root. Note: it is generally considered unsafe to run your entire X environment as root. Instead, run your window manager as a normal user, open a terminal window (such as xterm or KDE's konsole, become root with su (you need to be in the wheel group in /etc/group for this), and then type kcontrol. Click on the icon on the left marked "System", then on "Login manager". On the right you'll see various configurable options, which the KDE manual will explain in greater detail. Click on "sessions" on the right. Depending on what window managers or desktop environments you have currently installed, you can type their names in "New type" and add them. (These are just labels so far, not commands, so you can write KDE and GNOME rather than startkde or gnome-session.) Include a label failsafe. Play with the other menus as you like (those are mainly cosmetic and self-explanatory). When you're done, click on "Apply" at the bottom, and quit the control center. To make sure kdm understands what your above labels (KDE, GNOME etc) mean, you need to edit some more files: the same ones used by xdm. In your terminal window, as root, edit the file /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/Xsession. You will come across a section in the middle looking like this (by default): case $# in 1) case $1 in failsafe) exec xterm -geometry 80x24-0-0 ;; esac esac You will need to add a few lines to this section. Assuming the labels you gave earlier were KDE2 and GNOME, the following will do: case $# in 1) case $1 in KDE2) exec /usr/X11R6/bin/startkde ;; GNOME) exec /usr/X11R6/bin/gnome-session ;; failsafe) exec xterm -geometry 80x24-0-0 ;; esac esac To make sure your KDE choice of a login-time desktop background is also honored, you will need to add the following line to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/Xsetup_0: /usr/X11R6/bin/kdmdesktop Now, you need only to make sure kdm is started at the next bootup. To learn how to do this, read the section on xdm, and do the same thing replacing references to the xdm program by kdm. That's it. Your next login screen should have a pretty face and lots of menus. Anti-aliased Fonts Tired of blocky staircase edges to your fonts under X11? Tired of unreadable text in web browsers? Well, no more. Starting with version 4.0.2, XFree86 supports anti-aliasing via its "RENDER" extension, and starting with version 2.3, Qt (the toolkit used by KDE) supports this extension. Configuring this is described in on antialiasing X11 fonts. So if you're running up-to-date software, anti-aliasing is possible on your KDE2 desktop. Just go to your KDE2 menu, go to Preferences -> Look and Feel -> Style, and click on the checkbox "Use Anti-Aliasing for Fonts and Icons". That's all. If you're running a Qt application which is not part of KDE, you may need to set the environment variable QT_XFT to true before starting your program. XFCE About XFCE XFCE is based on the gtk+ toolkit used by GNOME, but is much more lightweight and meant for those who want a simple, efficient desktop which is nevertheless easy to use and configure. Visually, it looks very much like CDE, found on commercial Unix systems. Some of XFCE's features are: A simple, easy-to-handle desktop Fully configurable via mouse, with drag and drop, etc Main panel similar to CDE, with menus, applets and app launchers Integrated window manager, file manager, sound manager, GNOME compliance module, and other things Themeable (since it uses gtk+) Fast, light and efficient: ideal for older/slower machines or machines with memory limitations More information on XFCE can be found on the XFCE website. Installing XFCE A binary package for xfce exists (at the time of writing). To install, simply do this: &prompt.root; pkg_add -r xfce Alternatively, you may prefer to build from source. The ports tree comes to the rescue again: &prompt.root; cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/xfce &prompt.root; make install clean All necessary source packages (including dependencies) will be automagically fetched, built and installed, and the build areas cleaned up afterwards. Now you want to tell the X server to launch XFCE the next time you start X. Simply type this: &prompt.root; echo "/usr/X11R6/bin/startxfce" > ~/.xinitrc The next time you start X, XFCE will be your desktop. (Note, as before: if you're logging in via a display manager like xdm, you should either create an .xsession, as described in the section on GNOME, but with the /usr/X11R6/bin/startxfce command; or, configure your display manager to allow choosing a desktop at login time, as explained in the section on kdm.)