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The version of the X Window System most commonly used on GNU/Linux operating systems, including GNOME and KDE desktop environments.

The current version is 11, and the current release of this version is 6, so you might see things like X11R6.

From the X(1) manual page

The X Consortium requests that the following names be used

when referring to this software

X

X Window System

X Version 11

X Window System, Version 11

X11

However, many people still refer to the system anyway as "XWindows".

X is responsible for drawing graphics (including text). Without X, you would only have the text mode that is build in to most display adapters (eg what you see when linux is booting up). XFree86 is a FreeSoftware implementation of the X protocol originally designed for the free x86 unix operating systems but now supports non-x86 hardware.

XFree86 version 4.3 (released Feb/Mar 2003) has lots of cool features. Some of the notable ones are:

  • ability to configure which keys are used for changing virtual terminals (used to be hard-coded to ctrl+alt+ (F1 - F6) and which keys are used for changing screen resolutions (used to be hard-coded to ctrl+alt+ (KP_+ and KP_-).
  • The Cygwin port can now run "rootless". This means that you can use Microsoft Windows as your window manager, whereas previously cygwin needed one window and ran all x applications within that single window. This was the biggest advantage that commercial win32 xservers had over the free ones, until now :)
  • AddToMe

History

From the bottom of the X (7) manpage -
The X Window System standard was originally developed at the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and all rights thereto were assigned to the X Consortium on January 1, 1994. X Consortium, Inc. closed its doors on December 31, 1996. All rights to the X Window System have been assigned to the Open Software Foundation.
From the bottom of the XFree86 (7) manpage -
XFree86 was originally based on X386 1.2 by Thomas Roell, which was contributed to the then X Consortium's X11R5 distribution by SGCS.

When the Open Group changed the licence of their X11R6.4 release to be non-Free in 1998, the XFree86 project kept their own fork under the more liberal license, and had much more active developer support. (See this debian-devel post). Also, RMS talks about this in his essay on CopyLeft vs non-CopyLeft (but still free) licenses at http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/x.html. The XFree86 implementation of the X11 protocol is the one that survived.

In 2004, the XFree86 leadership announced a change to their license, introducing the documentation/advertising clause of the old-style BSDLicense (now removed from BSD software) to their upcoming XFree86 4.4 release. Because this is interpreted to be incompatible with GPL'd software, this release will not be included in major Linux distributions:

It is probable that in the near/mid-term future, the FreeDesktop XServer will become the de-facto software used on Linux distributions.

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