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XFree86 4.3.0 in Debian Unstable
Anonymous Coward writes "XFree86 4.3.0 has finally made it into Debian unstable. See the announcement." Note that Direct Rendering is broken (there's already a bug filed, and I'm experiencing the same problem - looks like something small and stupid, affecting everyone), so don't dist-upgrade just yet.
Well that's great I just finished gettting my 2.2 kernel working and now this
"Talent does what it can; genius does what it must."
This highlights one of the great advantages of debian - by the time they're ready to upgrade to version 4.4, all this licensing fiasco will be gone and forgotten.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
On my debian laptop... Debs and instructions can be found here.
IF you installed Debian via Knoppix (like I did) you will of got it already. But 4.3 is really the end of the Line thanks to the liecence crap!
Now if only they couild get KDE 3.2 in there...
And because of XFree86's license change, Debian will now be as up to date as all the other distros. In your face, Gentoo zealots!
This is not mean to be a troll, honest. But wasn't the whole purpose of Debian Unstable to be really up to date? I mean, when people complain that debian is way too far behind, debian fans are quick to point out that debian has three distros and that unstable is really quite stable and as up to date as other distros. Now, XFree86 4.3.0 was released on the 26th of February last year - Why did it take a whole year for it to be included in unstable?
Not the distro, per se, but the concept. I am as ardent a supporter of the Free Software cause as anyone, and Debian most closely represents my views as a proponent of Free Software. By not including any software which does not conform to the terms of the GPL, Debian has taken a firm stand against the encroachment of closed source software into their distribution.
I think that's not entirely truth. Debian includes Apache and its licence is not GPL compatible.
Honestly, I use debian as much as possible. I don't worry to much that unstable lags behind gentoo because gentoo caused me many headaches. I have no problem with stable being old because if you compare it to any enterprise version of linux you will see similarly aged applications.
Testing on the other hand is a mess. I am using it on one out of all the systems I have debian on (~6) and have seen 0 benefit in using it over unstable. I am trying to be a good community citizen and at least use testing to see that it gets moved to stable, but it mostly sucks in the mean time.
As I see it there is no other distro that is as easy to use (not grandma easy, but admin easy), and as ambitious in scope. So stick that in your portage and smoke it.
Specifically, Daniel Stone's backport of 4.3, since June, on a laptop.
Finding more recent but unofficial packages for Debian isn't any more difficult than finding ones for Redhat.
I used to be annoyed that X always lagged behind so much in debian/sid. But then I realized, after upgrading to 4.3, do I as a user notice anything different? absolutely not. It might be slightly faster, not that I notice with a 1.33ghz AMD machine... Why does it really matter what version of X you're running, as long as it can handle dri, you can play you games, render true type fonts, etc. Not that I play games under linux anyway, that's what my "play" XP Pro box is for.
Remember Debian has 11 architectures to support... far more than any other major distro, and far more that the XFree86 team supports.
So you can bitch that once again Debian is behind the times, but remmember YOUR copy of XFree86 is more stable because of all the porting and testing the fine folks at the Debian X Strike Force do.
I just have to say I was glad to wait this long, and good work guys.
I'm sure you've taking a bunch of crap with 4.3 taking so long to get into unstable (hell, I wanted to flame you once or twice). Anyway, I just want to say you and X Strike Force team do a fantastic job, and THANK YOU!!!
Ah yes, DRI works for you with the Nvidia driver. You know that the Nvidia driver doesn't use the DRI infrastructure right?
Why not fork?
The Debian X packages have a problem with some SiS chipsets!!!
I installed from Knoppix long ago and having been updating since then. I installed the new X packages and rebooted only to get the dreaded screen "melting" screen that happens with some SiS chips. Problem was this didn't just happen when exiting X, it also happened when starting X. Whoops. Of course the testing and stable trees had the same problems.
This screwed me of using X unless I wanted to compile the whole thing myself (on a notebook? No thanks). Thankfully I had just imaged my hard disk a few days ago using Knoppix and was able to restore. Look here for instructions (hint: start with cheatcodes dma 2 and leave the thing alone while restoring).
I'll be filing a bug report on this one for sure.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
I like the concept too, but I think a lot of people get overly emotional about the idealistic aspects of the distribution when a bit more pragmatism would go a lot farther.
Why does Debian rock?
Debian rocks because they are nitpicky about all that shit. It means that I don't have to be. Their work rewards your laziness, and that's a good thing!
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
Nope. The "perfect" desktop distro would be a more up-to-date version of debian, with something as nice as YaST. Perhaps User Linux will provide the funding necisarry for this. Here is what I have found for the current distros:
For the desktop SuSE is king - it has great hardware support and YaST is much better than what Mandrake and Redhat have to offer (if only they would release it under a better licence). One edge that RedHat Linux had over SuSE, wast that there were more third party packages made for it, however now that RHL does not exist this is not a factor. Like any other RPM based distro though, after a year or two you will get to the point where it is easier to just do a clean install of the newest version rather than continue to update.
For the server, debian is great - it is rock solid, and the easiest distro to keep up-to-date without any down-time. However, if your employer really wants support then RedHat enterprise would be the best way to go.
Slackware was my first distro, and is wonderfull in its simplicity of design. I still recomend it to anyone who wants to learn linux, not just have a windows replacement. Like RPM distros, you will likely want to wipe and start over every couple years. Once I learned linux fairly well, the day-to-day convienence of other distros moved me off slackware.
Fedora stands alone as being the most up-to-date distro due to it's short release cycle, so it is the obvious choice for those who want to be on the cutting edge. It actually seems to be quite stable despite it's cutting edgeness. But when you release every couple months you can't expect to be able to support a release for any length of time. IMHO, the only advantage that Gentoo has is that it is more up-to-date than debian. The package manager seems nicer than rpm, but not as convienent as apt. I have never had the desire to use it myself. Knoppix is great for trying out linux, troubleshooting, and installing a desktop debian system. I keep a couple burned copies on hand at all times. And of course there are dozens of distros that are usefull for cool niche projects.
Here's how you can fix DRI. First, confirm that you are having the same problem:
/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri/tdfx_dri.so: undefined symbol: sse_test_dummy
e sa-dri
$ LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose glxinfo
[...]
libGL error: dlopen failed:
[...]
The actual name of the module will vary depending on your hardware.
You can retrieve the xlibmesa-dri package from experimental, version 4.3.0-0pre1v5 and use this instead of the version from unstable. This works for some reason. Download it here:
http://packages.debian.org/experimental/x11/xlibm
Enjoy.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Debian works for me. I've not found any software that doesn't have up-to-date packages; if they're not in the main tree it's normally for a good reason, and apt-get.org can usually find them. Failing that there's Google and the helpful IRC channel and mailing lists.
apt-rpm, while much nicer to deal with than native rpm, still suffers from the fact that nothing beats Debian's own apt repositories for sheer quality and stability, thanks to the zealous adherence to quality of the majority of Debian package maintainers. Actually, it's this QA which puts Debian ahead of almost every other distro, especially the (IME) terminally crashy Gentoo.
I wouldn't say that Debian is the perfect distro, but I think it's as close as you'll come to one.
I pulled 4.3.0 out of the "experimental" branch, I believe it was, months ago, already.
It worked fine, then. So, now that they've moved it to "unstable", it's broken? Great, thanks guys.
I live in fear of doing "apt-get upgrade" sometimes.
LOL.. yes, I know runnign a mix of "unstable" and "experimental" branches is just asking for trouble.. but except for a version mismatch that caused apt-get to uninstall more than half of my system a few weeks ago, I've never had any problems.. lol
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Debian makes a great server. It's perfect for the situation where you can't use FreeBSD and you aren't getting hounded for Red Hat. I've never used it as a desktop because it's not well suited for it. Much like FreeBSD doesn't make a great desktop OS. Gentoo, on the other hand, makes an excellent desktop OS. I'd don't run Gentoo on servers anymore though. I've never understood the "holy war world domination" aspect of any of this. To corporate America it comes across as so much childish prattle. We actually had an employee trying to sell us on Debian for something completely unsuited and one of his bullits was a "saving the world from microsoft!!!!" rant and the really sad thing was he didn't even understand why including that "point" was a bad idea. When I tried to explain that our proprietary storage solution would not support Debian for their active/passive dual path fiber channel driver, he flipped out. Suggested we "sell the piece of shit" because it wouldn't work with Debian. Sure. We are going to part with our half million dollar fiber channel array because the company won't support Debian. Now I have higher-ups asking me what we should do with this guy and saying "I think he has a real passion for his work" isn't cutting it. They hear "he's a nut". Zealotry is fine but keep it at home. Oh, and there is no excuse for waiting over 13 months for an "unstable" version of XFree. You apologists can apologize away all you want, but that is ridiculous. I'm sorry. It's also hard to sell people on the idea that a free Linux with a 2.2 stable kernel is better than a 600 dollar "Enterprise Server" Linux with a 2.4.21-9 kernel. There is a lot of Red Hat 3.0 ES here. And even though I freaking HATE Red Hat because of how shitty rpm is, I have to admit that we have had zero problems with up2date and patches, and they seem to be very up to date with them. It has actually been a joy lately admining the 20 or so boxes. It's STILL not nearly as easy as babysitting a well configured FreeBSD farm, but it's getting pretty close.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
./ editors should better proof-read those headlines. When I first read that headline, I expected a flame war.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.