User interfaces and desktops

User interfaces and desktops is a small, awareness-level objective covering the X Window System architecture, display managers, and accessibility features. Objective 106 of LPIC-1 Exam 102-500, worth 6.67% of the exam.

Share of the exam
6.67%
Questions in a real sitting
roughly 4 of 60
Questions in this bank
22
Signed for by a person
0
Machine-checked only
22

Partly checked. None of the 22 questions here has been read against the cited source by a person. 22 questions have been checked against their cited clause by an automated pass — which is not the same thing, and is not a signature.

Only questions a person has signed for are used in mock exams here. That is the whole difference between the two kinds of checking above.

How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.

What this objective covers

The 22 questions written for this objective cite 3 LPI exam objectives (106.1, 106.2, 106.3) and 8 manual pages (Xsession(5), Xwayland(1), setxkbmap(1), vncserver(1), xdm(1), xfreerdp(1), xhost(1), xorg.conf(5)).

They break down as 15 single-answer questions, 4 type-the-answer questions and 3 choose-several questions.

What this objective is really about

The smallest objective on the paper, and mostly a vocabulary check. There is no expectation that you can configure X by hand; there is an expectation that you know which component is which and can recognise the names.

The X client and server naming, which is backwards

X is named from the point of view of the display hardware. The X server is the program that controls the screen, keyboard and mouse and offers them as a service. Applications are clients of that server — including the window manager, which is just a client with a special job. This means the machine sitting in front of you runs the server even when the program you are using lives on a remote host.

That is exactly what makes ssh -X work: the workstation runs the X server, the remote host runs the X client, and ssh tunnels the protocol between them. The remote host needs X client libraries but no X server at all. Authorisation is handled by a per-display cookie in ~/.Xauthority rather than by xhost, which is host-based, coarse and unsafe by comparison. DISPLAY is only an address in the form host:display.screen; it carries no secret.

Names to keep apart

A display manager presents the graphical login screen and starts the session: XDM, KDM, GDM and LightDM are the ones named in the objectives. A desktop environment is what you get after logging in — GNOME, KDE Plasma, Xfce, LXDE. A window manager draws frames and handles placement — Mutter, KWin, Openbox. Questions here are usually a list where you separate the three categories.

For accessibility, learn the keyboard set as a group: Sticky Keys latches modifiers, Slow Keys requires a key to be held before it registers, Bounce Keys ignores rapid repeats, Toggle Keys beeps on Caps Lock and Num Lock, and Mouse Keys drives the pointer from the keypad. For visual accessibility, Orca is the screen reader that also drives braille displays via BrlTTY, while high contrast themes and magnifiers serve low vision, and on-screen keyboards such as GOK and Onboard address input rather than output.

Lessons in this objective

The objective cut into the pieces the blueprint declares. Each one has the material written out and the questions that test it.

Drill this objective

The trainer can run a short practice set drawn from this objective alone, which is what the weight column above is for: revise the heavy objectives first.

Practise User interfaces and desktops

Questions on this objective (page 1 of 2)

Practise User interfaces and desktops

The other objectives in LPIC-1 Exam 102-500