X server
X server
[′eks ‚ser·vər] (computer science)
Software that draws the screen image and handles standard input in an X Windows System; in contrast to typical usage of the term server, an X server is located on the user's computer; the client is the application that is displayed, which may be located on a remote node of the network.
X server
(graphics, operating system)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.
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.