Web site: http://www.gnome.org/
The GNOME Project is a community that makes great software. GNOME is Free Software: all our work is free to use, modify and redistribute. Everyone is welcome to participate in its development.
The GNOME Project was started in 1997 by two then university students, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena. Their aim: to produce a free (as in freedom) desktop environment. Since then, GNOME has grown into a hugely successful enterprise. Used by millions of people across the world, it is the most popular desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems. The desktop has been utilised in successful, large-scale enterprise and public deployments, and the project’s developer technologies are utilised in a large number of popular mobile devices.
Freedom and community go hand in hand in GNOME. The project’s software is free to download, modify and redistribute; its communication channels and development infrastructure are visible to all. It is this freedom and openness that enables the GNOME community to exist, by allowing new contributors to take part and enabling companies to collaborate in the production of mutually beneficial technologies. GNOME is proud to be a part of the GNU Project.
Source: "About US | GNOME", <http://www.gnome.org/about/>, retrieved May 11, 2011.
The X window system (commonly X Window System or X11, based on its current major version being 11) is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces (GUI) for networked computers. It creates a hardware abstraction layer where software is written to use a generalized set of commands, allowing for device independence and reuse of programs on any computer that implements X.
Source: "X Window System", <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System>, May 11, 2011.
X originated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The current protocol version, X11, appeared in September 1987. The X.Org Foundation leads the X project, with the current reference implementation, X.Org Server, available as free and open source software under the MIT License and similar permissive licenses.
The X.Org project provides an open source implementation of the X Window System. The development work is being done in conjunction with the freedesktop.org community. The X.Org Foundation is the educational non-profit corporation whose Board serves this effort, and whose Members lead this work.
Source: "X.Org Wiki", <http://www.x.org>, May 11, 2011.
freedesktop.org is open source / open discussion software projects working on interoperability and shared technology for X Window System desktops. The most famous X desktops are GNOME and KDE, but developers working on any Linux/UNIX GUI technology are welcome to participate.
freedesktop.org is building a base platform for desktop software on Linux and UNIX. The elements of this platform have become the backend for higher-level application-visible APIs such as Qt, GTK+, XUL, VCL, WINE, GNOME, and KDE. The base platform is both software and specifications.
Source: "freedesktop.org", <http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/>, retrieved May 11, 2011.
Metacity (pronounced /məˈtæsɨti/, rhyming with "capacity" with the stress on the second syllable[1]) was the window manager used by default in the GNOME desktop environment[2] until GNOME 3, where it was replaced by Mutter.[3] The development of Metacity was started by Havoc Pennington and it is released under the GNU General Public License.
Before the introduction of Metacity in GNOME 2.2, GNOME used Enlightenment and then Sawfish as its window manager. Although Metacity is part of the GNOME project and designed to integrate into the GNOME desktop, it does not require GNOME to run, and GNOME can be used with different window managers provided that they support the part of the ICCCM specification that GNOME requires.
Metacity uses the GTK+ graphical widget toolkit to create its user interface components, which makes it themeable and makes it blend in with other GTK+ applications.
An X window manager is a window manager which runs on top of the X Window System, a windowing system mainly used on Unix-like systems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_window_managers
Compiz is one of the first compositing window managers for the X Window System that uses 3D graphics hardware to create fast compositing desktop effects for window management. The effects, such as a minimization effect and a cube workspace are implemented as loadable plugins. Because it conforms to the Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual standard, Compiz can substitute for the default Mutter in GNOME or KWin in KDE.
Compiz plugins include the cube effect (example to the right), Alt-Tab application-switching with live previews or icons, and a feature similar to Exposé. The Composite extension to X is used, as is the OpenGL extension GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap.[2] The first version of Compiz was released as free software by Novell (SUSE) in January 2006 in the wake of the (also new) Xgl.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiz
Source: "Metacity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia", <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacity>, May 11, 2011.