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Exam objective 1.110.4 has a weight of 5, and verifies that candidates are able to customize a systemwide desktop environment and, or, a window manager. This includes customization of menus, configuring the desired X terminal, and exporting the X display to a workstation. A window manager determines how your windows look, and how you go about running programs. There are lots of window managers. This is a list of some of them. These seem to be the most popular, but it's hard to tell. These are the names that seem to show up a lot. Each one has its own configuration options, but some things are standard to all of them. It's the xinit program that starts X running. Most likely the startx script is used to run xinit. StartX sets up the environments and arguments used by xinit. In either case, the file xinitrc is the configuration file that determines the window manager to be run. Look in this file and see where it starts the window manager. You can copy this file to your home directory and name it .xinitrc and it will be used instead of the global file. You can change the window manager right there. If you want, you can just create a simple version of the file. This simple example of the three line script will work. It's a shell script, as you can see from the first line. The second line runs an X terminal in the background. You always want to run one of those so you can get out if you need to. The last line uses the exec command to run the window manager. In this example, it's TWM, which is Tom's Window Manager. Every window manager has its own configuration files. You'll need to check its documentation for other things you can do. And of course, you could include other programs in this script if you wished. A standard configuration file that works for an X program is the Xdefaults file. Every X program reads this file in your home directory and looks for its own name. If it finds its name in the file, it will read the parameter and value just as if you had included them on the command line. You can use it to configure the window manager or any other X program. It's in each user's home directory, so each user can have his own set of defaults. If you have a remote X server, it's capable of running programs on your local machine with a window display going to that remote machine. Also, for that application, the mouse and keyboard will be diverted to that remote machine. That diversion is all done by the setting of display. The display environment variable is normally set to the local display, and the local display normally has only one screen, so it's set to the default of a colon followed by 0.0. If you wanted the window to appear on the screen of a remote machine called Gorp, you could change the environment variable to the name of that machine and the window would appear over there. You could also specify the host and display on the command line when you start a program and the environment variable will be ignored. But the remote machine must have permission and such permission can be granted or denied by the program Xhost. This is a command line program. If you enter the command with a plus sign in front of a name, the remote host is granted permission. If you put a minus sign in front of the name, access will be denied. You can just enter the command with a plus sign and no name and any remote host will be permitted. Find out about window managers. Change the window manager on your system. If you're using a desktop environment, you might want to check out the ones that are compatible with that environment, the one you're using. You may accidentally find a window manager that you like better than the one you already have. That's what happened to me.