X

A lot of what Organic Design is about is decentralised organisation which is why we try and make all our organisational tools web acessible. For some time now we've been trying to find a decent accounting and time-management system which is free, open-source and web-accessible, but our research has not been fruitfull. So this article contains notes and information regarding an alternative solution, which is to serve desktop-based applications remotely from the Organic Design VPS. This means we have the whole spectrum of excellent accounting software available such as GnuCash.

Requirements

• Must be easily useable from windows clients too (testing XWinLogon)
• Preferably a single icon can be set up for clients to open a given app with no other desktop/environment aspects visible or available
• Server installation must be fully replicatable and documented in Debian Post Install

Browser-based X

Another related idea is to find or create an implementation of X which can run in a browser either as a Java applet or SWF. I'm not sure how big an undertaking this would be, but it's an interesting line of research anyway. At the foundation of X is the X Window System core protocol through which four kinds of messages pass, requests, replies, events and errors. Note that all X client/server terminology is from the perspective of the running application which sees itself as a client to remote window servers.

X programming structure

Xlib is an X Window System protocol client library in the C programming language. It contains functions for interacting with an X server. These functions allow programmers to write programs without knowing the details of the protocol. Few applications use Xlib directly; rather, they employ other libraries that use Xlib functions to provide widget toolkits:

See also

• Remote X Apps mini-HOWTO
• WiredX - An xserver applet
• Izzy - a SWF thin client library
• XWinLogon
• XMing
• mrxvt - lightweight win32 xterm
• thinstation - thin xterm linux distro
• The X Programming Model