A process, in an
X Window System which controls a
bitmap display device and usually
also a
keyboard and
mouse or other
pointing device. The
X server performs operations on request from
client
applications, which may be on the same computer or a
different computer connected via a
network.
Note that typical
client-server architectures do
input-output on the client and processing on the server
whereas in X the terms are reversed as the X server is serving
IO rather than processing resources to the application.
If the two computers are not both
Unix machines (e.g. one is
a
Windows machine running
VNC) or if a more secure
connection is required (e.g. tunneling with
ssh), the
clients may talk to a
proxy X server that forwards the
requests to another machine where the real IO takes place.