Re: New Install - nothing happens for plot command

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 07/02/2008, eli brossell <address@hidden> wrote:
> I don't know what an X server is.

Roughly speaking, an X server is the GUI that we use in free software.
When applications can't be compiled natively to Windows, for instance,
we use an X server in Windows instead, and it's the only thing we use
in GNU/Linux.

More technically, the X Window System, or X for short, is a network
protocol. The server runs the graphics, the clients are application
programs that connect to the server to display GUIs. Since it's a
network protocol, the clients can be running in a remote machine
displaying GUIs on your local machine (known as X forwarding). This
used to be more useful when you could have a network with one large
server in which an application like Octave could reside, and many dumb
terminals that could connect to the server and display the graphical
result of an Octave computation on their screens. You can think of X
as a form of remote desktop and VNC that has existed in the Unix-like
world since the early 80's.

Welcome to Octave.

- Jordi G. H.