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XFree86 4.0.1 Review
Fawking DSL writes: "BSD Today reviews the new features, supported cards, and installation of XFree86 version 4.0.1." The article starts off by saying that XF864.0 "Shocked The World" which I find mind numbingly amusing, but it's a good review.
Antialiasing of fonts was invented because screens had fairly low resolution and so fonts looked jagged compared to typefaces in the real world, like books and magazines.
No, it was invented for images to look better. Antialising is not used just for fonts. Take a look at a web site with someone who didn't antialias their images, and it looks awful even at high resolutions. Granted, at a high enough resolution you wouldn't be able to tell, but we're talking about thousands of pixels per inch before you wouldn't be able to tell.
Also, you seem to be under the impression that photographs are not "antialiased", but they are (although, it's not called that). One of the ways you can tell a fake photograph is that the edges of an image are too clean.
it just makes the text look more hazy and less well defined, which puts more strain on the eyes.
I know that some people feel this way, but you're by far in the minority.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I would recommend like this
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
For NVidia, although, this support didn't come easily. Several days after XFree86 4.0.1's release, reports of problems all over starting springing up-and all fingers were pointed at NVidia. It seemed that NVidia's 0.9-3 drivers were not up to par with the new XFree release and caused much commotion between NVidia users all over. A week and two patches later, NVidia support is finally up and going and a new series of drivers, 0.9-4 have been released, although not publicly on NVidia's website.
The 0.93 drivers not being up to par is an understatement. If you have a TNT2 card you can expect the X server to segfault on startup. After installing the 0.94 drivers it started right up for my but I still occasionally get some corruption on the desktop--other than that they seem to work nicely.
Anyway, if you are looking for the mysterious 0.94 drivers for the NVidia chipset, I found them on the bot on irc.openprojects.net #nvidia. Supposedly they're on fileplanet also, but I couldn't locate them there. Just figured I'd save the TNT2 users the hassle of waiting for NVidia to put them up on their site.
numb
Right her e.
The NVIDIA Linux FAQ has been updated too. In particular, 0.94 Changes
Okay, here's a point of view that's been rarely expressed here, but here goes: font antialiasing is a crufty outdated process which isn't really very useful on today's monitors.
Antialiasing of fonts was invented because screens had fairly low resolution and so fonts looked jagged compared to typefaces in the real world, like books and magazines. Also, unlike black typeface on white paper, computer programs and Web pages used some interesting background and font colors, which could be visually jarring in their contrast. Solution: Blend the edges of fonts into the surrounding background color, and the fonts were more pleasing to the eye both because jaggies got eliminated and because the color gradient made the color transition between font and background less jarring.
Fast forward to today, and 15 inch monitors capable of 1024 by 768 are the minimal norm, and 17 inch monitors capable of 1600 by 1200 are fast becoming commonplace. So, the problem with jaggies is no longer a problem at all. The problem with visually jarring combinations of color is no longer a problem, either, because people are as used to Web and application colors as they are to standard black-on-white printing.
Font antialiasing becomes useless unless you're going to be running at very low resolutions. Otherwise, it just makes the text look more hazy and less well defined, which puts more strain on the eyes. It also impacts system performance: I noticed a significant speed boost in Explorer responsiveness when turning anti-aliasing off in Win98 on a K6-2 400. Anti-aliasing is great for games and graphics displayed at fairly low resolutions, but on the modern desktop of a contemporary OS it is unneeded and impacts system performance negatively.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Steps to upgrade XFree86 from rawhide
This worked for XFree86 4.0, I'm on step 4 right now :). Remember, the rawhide packages are sometimes broken, if it doesnt work, try again in a few days.
treke
- Install RPM 4.0.
- Download the RPM 4.0 tarball ( ftp://ftp.rpm.org/pub/rpm/test/rpm-4. 0.tar.gz ).
- Download db3, the database format used by RPM 4.0 ( ftp://ftp.rpm.org/pub/rpm/ test/db3-3.1.14-0.2.6x.src.rpm ).
- Build ( rpm --rebuild db3-3.1.14-0.2.6x.src.rpm ) and install ( ls
/usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/db3-* | xargs rpm -ihv ) db3. Build ( rpm -tb rpm-4.0.tar.gz ) and install ( ls /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/RedHat/RPMS/i386/rpm-* | xargs rpm -ihv ) RPM 4.0. - Convert the RPM database to the format used by RPM 4.0 ( rpm --rebuilddb ).
- Moving the old database files (
/var/lib/rpm/*.rpm ) out of /var/lib/rpm is necessary to prevent RPM 4.0 from segfaulting.
- Update initscripts, modutils and chkconfig to be compatible with those expected by the rawhide distribution of XFree86 4.0.1.
- Download the updated packages.
- initscripts 5.27 ( ftp://download.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/redhat
/ rawhide/SRPMS/SRPMS/initsc ripts-5.27-1.src.rpm ) - modutils 2.3.11 ( ftp://download.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/redhat
/ rawhide/SRPMS/SRPMS/modutil s-2.3.11-7.src.rpm ) - chkconfig 1.2.1 ( ftp://download.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/redhat
/ rawhide/SRPMS/SRPMS/chkconf ig-1.2.1-1.src.rpm ) - Build and install the updated packages.
- rpm --rebuild initscripts-5.27-1.src.rpm ; rpm -ihv
/usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/initscripts-5.27-1.i386. rpm - rpm --rebuild modutils-2.3.11-7.src.rpm ; rpm -ihv
/usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/modutils-2.3.11-7.i386.r pm - rpm --rebuild chkconfig-1.2.1-1.src.rpm ; rpm -ihv
/usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/chkconfig-1.2.1-1.i386.r pm
- Build and install XFree86 4.0.1.
- Download XFree86 4.0.1 ( ftp://download.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/redhat
/ rawhide/SRPMS/SRPMS/XFree8 6-4.0.1-0.30.src.rpm ). - Build XFree86 4.0.1 ( CFLAGS='-I/usr/src/redhat/BUILD/XFree86-4.0.1/xc/
e xport/include' LDFLAGS='-I/usr/src/redhat/BUILD/XFree86-4.0.1/exp ort/lib' rpm --rebuild XFree86-4.0.1-0.30.src.rpm ) and install the desired XFree86 4.0.1 RPMs located in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/XFree86-*. Set CFLAGS and LDFLAGS is needed else the build will complain about being inable to find some parts of xlib, which should only an issue when building on a system without XFree86 installed.
I haven't really had any problems except for warnings in the USB portion of rc.sysinit, which can be commented out. Some files were renamed or were moved around as well (i.e., conf.modules becomes modules.conf and the init scripts are moved from