Publications Details
Extending the X Window System
The X Window System was originally developed in 1984 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It provides client-server computing functionality and also facilitates the establishment of a distributed computing environment. Since its inception the X Window System has undergone many enhancements. Despite these enhancements there will always be a functionality desired in the standard released version of X that is not supported or commercially or academically available. The developers of the X Window System have designed it in such a way that it is possible to add functionality that is not included in the standard release. This is called an extension. Extensions are one method used to develop a customized version of the X Window System to support a specialized application. This report presents the mechanics of adding an extension and examines a particular extension that was developed at Sandia National Laboratories to support data compression in X Windows which was one aspect of the Desktop Video and Collaborative Engineering Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD).