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.

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!

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: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: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?

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: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.