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.

Comments

This is fantastic

[klupo]

Well that's great I just finished gettting my 2.2 kernel working and now this

Good old debian

[kinnell]

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.

Already been in Knoppix-debian!

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Woohoo!

[MrHanky]

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!

Isn't this late?

[theridersofrohan]

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?

Re:Isn't this late?

[twilight30]

Since you asked nicely, here's why:

Debian tests for a wider range of architectures than the rest of the Linux distros, and in fact wider than XFree86 itself does. (Branden Robinson points this out on his site - Google for 'Debian X Strike Force').

The odd architectures are more difficult to test for, but it results in a couple of benefits:

* Changes can go upstream (obviously, I'm not referring to 4.4) -- and in fact XF86 kind of expects Debian to test for them
* Debian as a whole gets a much more stable set of X packages than the others do -- unstable packages for X are at least as stable as most other distros' production versions.

Re:Isn't this late?

[swillden]

This is not mean to be a troll, honest. But wasn't the whole purpose of Debian Unstable to be really up to date?

Debian unstable *is* really up to date, in general. However, there are a few high-profile packages, like XFree86, that tend to lag because of Debian's incredibly diverse platform set and high standards of quality. The wide variety of platforms doesn't affect most stuff nearly as much as hardware-oriented software like X.

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.

I run unstable on my laptop and my desktop (stable on my servers), and in my experience, unstable is not "as up to date as other distros", most of the time it's well *ahead* of the other distros. Because my systems get upgraded almost daily, I find that my biggest compatibility headaches with my colleagues on Red Hat, etc., is that I'm always running newer versions of everything than they are.

Re:Isn't this late?

[pjack76]

Well, also there's apparently a "hidden" flavor of Debian called experimental, where you can go to get things that haven't made it into unstable yet.

I *needed* XFree86 4.3, because it's the first version to support my video card--after digging through Debian's bug reports, I found out how to apt-get from the experimental pool, where XFree86 4.3 happily lives. Installed without a problem for me (I mean, I manually edit my XF86Config anyway.)

Re:Isn't this late?

[hummassa]

No, this is the point of *experimental*. XF4.3 is in experimental for quite some time now.

Re:Isn't this late?

[xenocide2]

Basically. Some might tell you that experimental is closer to an add on pack that you have to jump through hoops to install. These hoops are there for a reason: a lot of people run unstable and wouldn't be happy to see some important library changed out from underneath them with only one accommodating package. Thats the kind of experimental they mean. Its suggested that first time uploads be placed in experimental if you're not sure it will actually work on a given system. Debian has several systems available to developers to test things on for basic operation.

But really, the release cycle is a dependent on a couple of things: the number of submitted bugs in a package and the number of platforms debian runs on. Seems like with every release Debian picks up more architectures. If you're running PPC or SPARC it sounds like a nice deal, but many people looking for a i386 desktop solution see the consequential slow release cycle and shudder. But I'd rather not restart X into a crash screen, so I don't try to run the experimental XFree. I've run into problems with upgrades to GNOME on unstable--moving from 1.4 to 2.x originally didn't have any migration rules so your old .gnome conf files would knock gnome out. But overall its been pretty solid, most of the developers run unstable on their desktop, enough that in the past, freezing unstable until certain conditions were met was considered a motivator. Maybe if there was a push for developers toward testing as the preferred branch and unstable for new but known to be broken in certain cases, stable might closer reflect today's software and unstable might actually be up to date.

I've been using debian for about a year now, and its pretty fun. I just upgraded X and it took a whopping 10 minutes. The difference isn't very noticable to me. The changelog has lots of bugfixes concerning DRI that probably have kept it in experimental for so long. Seems like basically the most critical apps have a longer testing pipeline to run through into stable. Usually it takes 10 days in unstable to become a candidate for "testing." "Stable" hasn't moved in a long while because there's been some longstanding bugs between certain popular packages. Maybe QA is something underappreciated on a volunteer based distribution, but I like being able to look at a specific package's bug list.

Re:I love Debian

[fedux]

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.

Re:Been using 4.3 on Debian for months...

[ogre57]

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.

Don't start yapping about the delay..

[Captain Rotundo]

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.

Re:Don't start yapping about the delay..

[Captain Rotundo]

It does for the XFree86 guys, which is why the porting Debian does is so important!

A big thank you to Branden!!!

[Howard Beale]

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!!!

Re:DRI

[CableModemSniper]

Ah yes, DRI works for you with the Nvidia driver. You know that the Nvidia driver doesn't use the DRI infrastructure right?

Re:I love Debian

[twilight30]

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!

Re:Every distro has its flaws

[pavon]

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.

Workaround for DRI:

[molo]

Here's how you can fix DRI. First, confirm that you are having the same problem:

$ LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose glxinfo
[...]
libGL error: dlopen failed: /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri/tdfx_dri.so: undefined symbol: sse_test_dummy
[...]


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/xlibme sa-dri

Enjoy.

-molo

Re:Workaround for DRI:

[named]

Thanks for the info. I'm at work right now so can't try it out, but thought I'd mention an easy way to downgrade (seen elsewhere in this article, and somewhere in the docs) for others who might read this.

apt-get install xlibmesa-dri/experimental

I'm pretty sure you've got to have a line in /etc/apt/sources.list for experimental as well
(deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian ../project/experimental main contrib non-free)