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Slackware Chooses X.org Server Over XFree86
Ananamous Coward writes "Some big distros had already dumped XFree86 for X.org for license reasons, but now Slackware, one of the most classical and stable ones, has announced in its changelog for slackware-current that they are switching to X.org, mostly for compatibility reasons. Looks like X.org is now the future of X for Linux ..."
never know, they could just be running X with a big terminal open.. no GUI :) Honestly the only things I ever use X for is web/multiple terminals on one screen.. everything else is usually text based.. I'm far faster with commands then I am with GUI's.
I've left to find myself. If you happen to see me, please, keep me there until I return.
One of the things the XFree86 tyrant touted was that Slackware still used his 'stuff' - i wonder what he'll do now.
If you look at the current page of distros using XFree86 you'll be hard pressed to find one that is in common usage - pretty sad considering that until the moron decided to mess around with license it was the defacto standard on every Linux distribution
Goes to show you...don't mess around with licenses....Freedom is Freedom and that's what FOSS is all about.
All the device drivers for ati and nvidia are written for XFree86. These enable 3d acceleration and I'm not sure they are compatible with X.org... Does this mean that we will have to get the already hesitant ati to start new drivers after x months of slow but steady improvement?
The Television Wiki
My primary concern would of course be diverging X releases. While some may adopt X.org I would bet many will continue on using xfree86. In fact the majority that do oppose the new license will most likely keep their own fork in house. Will all this divergence lead to good or just confusion?
:(){
Or they could be taking the high road and being tactful, rather than coming right out and saying it's because of the license changes.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Believe it or not, two of the friendliest installations IMHO are Slack and Gentoo. Slack is extremely simple, and Gentoo has, hands down, the best dicumentation and forum help of any other distro. As for graphical environments, Slackware uses an lncurses based installer;)
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
And I'm sure the next release from ATI will, too. Ditto for nVidia. The graphics chip vendors don't support XF86, they support Linux. And when pretty much the entire Linux world is moving to X.org, it's pretty obvious they're going to be targetting that.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
It's just a classic story of ego causing someone to "go down with the ship"..
Oh well, if anything this is a story of how Free software has a real advantage over anything where the author has more control, if the author goes insane or makes a bad decision, just fork and forget. This is a best case too, since there's not many people willing to maintain a redundant fork, so it's not really dividing community resources.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
could not agree more. slackware is the most logical gnu/linux distribution i've ever used. simple and easy. sure, redhat/fedora might run (almost) out of the box, but if you want to change something, its harder than with slack.
or maybe its just me..
I do not think I am being radical when I say this is what is happening here.
http://mediagoblin.org/
From user land, are there any visible differences?
Steve
Thats exactly what linux avoids. You can have a completely custom distro, WITH OR WITHOUT A GUI. no distro can be 'XFree86' -ONLY- or xorg -ONLY- because its all the same stuff. you might not be able to run both at once, but you can sure as hell choose which one you want to use, and BOTH will work. You can also run a commercial X server, and still run gnome/kde without xorg OR XFree86. Linux offers choice.
Hrrm... I usually just sign my name.
I think it depends a lot on your definition of "friendly." Gentoo has a definite forum, user community, and very extensive documentation. In this respect, it is "friendly." Yet, despite that, I wouldn't expect Joe Average to be able to get through that documentation and actually set the whole thing up. But then you have the Fedoras and the Mandrakes that configure everything for you and have happy little UIs that let you tinker with everything else. In that sense, these distros are also friendly, imho.
Why would divergence be a problem if the majority of distroes/flavours* (*the proper term for BSD variants as I learned on osnews) standardizes on one? Now almost the complete X.org implementation is in ports, and I think x.org will be the default (or 4.3 at worst) in 5.3 release. Also, note that one of the freedesktop.org developers (DRI work) is Eric Anholt. So don't worry, only good can come out of this fork :)
You have a point in as much as X.org is still just a snapshot pragmatically speaking, but I don't think we should be concerned about a lack of future development. The political support surrounding X.org from commercial distros sounds rock solid. Do you think Redhat and the rest are going to sit by and let X.org languish? XFree86 hasn't been dropped just because of the license change and the somewhat malignant internal politics. They had a reputation for ignoring downstream integrators. In any event, some interesting X11 developments were taking place outside of XFree86 before X.org became the center of libre X11 software. Check out the stuff at freedesktop.org. Keith Packard has sketched out some new extensions that will be good for window management and there's an effort underway to autotoolize the build system. Myself, I'd rather wait for an autotool'd 4.4-rc2 managed by people unafraid of granting CVS commit access to a maintainer than have XFree86-5.0 next month.
You're right--it is philisophical--but as a non-gamer, it's easy for me to keep my G400 with all open source drivers. But we're screwed now that it's become acceptable to ship binary only drivers and hide the specs.
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Micro distros don't have X, and do you know how hard it is to get a modern distro to fit in 20 MB of ram? I finally had to scrounge around for an old copy of RedHat, and then hack the install media to trick it into supporting my modern network card. Ugly.
The Gentoo "installer" is really just a boot prompt. The instructions are pretty straightforward and the steps very thoroughly explained. I just wish I had known about it back when I was building those laptops. (And no, I wouldn't have tried to compile software on those boxes. I'd build the system in a chrooted environment on my destop and then tarball the sucker.)
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
The stupid license in XFree86 drove distros away. And it is the legal reason: won't compatible with GPLed program. As a result, distros cannot legally distribute GPLed programs in binary form if they use new XFree86.
Only users are attracted to NVidia. No distro distribute NVidia. Even if they do, with agreement from NVidia, there are no legal risk.
Stupidity is no funny stuff.
Um, X is actually a standard, unlike the windowing protocols used by MacOS and Windows. There are *way* more implementations of the X11 standard than implementations of either of the other two protocols.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Not entirely.
The viral structure of the GPL is intended to ensure that it stays alive -- otherwise, other software will feed off of GPLed software and kill the license.
We have all kinds of systems that would simply collapse if you removed what is apparently overhead. Yes, there are lots of "unnecessary" marketing people at software companies, but without those "unnecessary" people to take advantage of quirks in the way the human mind works, marketers at other companies would do so, and the company would die.
While there are some people that take issue with the GPL (and even a few that take issue with the LGPL), I have yet to see another plausible system for spreading open source.
Microsoft likes the BSD license. The BSD license is great and all, but it means that closed-source companies inherently have an edge, since open-source types must reverse-engineer anything done by closed-source companies, but closed-source companies can use whatever the latest-and-greatest open source stuff is. For some things, this is fine -- reference implementations and the like. However, if you believe that open source is really a better system (and I think that it is a difficult argument to say that it is not), I don't see why you'd argue against doing whatever helps people transition to it.
May we never see th
And yes I realize both X's are from the same code base TODAY.. but that will slowly change over time as they go down different paths.
You *have* to be kidding. Open source suffers from PR damage by providing difference choices? By now, the closed source world would be *long* dead (well, perhaps not in the Microsoft world). Consider the following damaging and fragmenting choices (some may be out of date -- I haven't really followed closed source for a while):
* Quark, Pagemaker and InDesign
* Photoshop, PhotoPaint, Paintshop Pro
* Freehand, Illustrator, Corel Draw
* Word, WordPerfect
* Eudora, Pegasus Mail, Outlook, Outlook Express
* Maya, 3d Studio Max, Lightwave
* Norton Antivirus, McAfee
I don't agree that there is a significant PR problem with having choices available. I can think of almost no closed-source systems for which there is only one option available.
May we never see th
Frankly this is off topic but I just wish that ATI could just put more heart into their drivers like Nvidia does.
I have no idea what you're talking about. When Nvidia even has has an open-source driver, there might be some argument.
May we never see th
Just to keep things in perspective.. According to the Google Zeitgeist Linux is still at only around 1% of the desktop market share. That's roughly the same as the number of Windows 95 users. Yes, Linux users might arguably be more into high end graphics cards and games.. But if I were ATI, I'd be more focused on beating Nvidia in price and performance on Windows, with little regard to the 1% of users on Linux.
So.. keep converting desktop users to linux, and let ATI know how you feel I guess.
Peace.
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This kind of stuff happens all the time with proprietary software. Sudenly, the company has a new "vision", and you no longer seem to be part of it. But with proprietary software you are screwed. You can try to keep using the software, even though either the license, pricing structure or direction of development is no longer a good match for your need. Or you can change to an entirely different product, which can be very expensive in retraining.
Of course, this would also be possible with just about any open source license (e.g., BSD), so it really has nothing to do with RMS and GPL.
ripped off?
Since when is forking a product and making it better called 'ripping it off' ?
Nope. They aren't the same. Sometimes the X Window System is called X for shorter. The XFree86 Project produces a freely redistributable open-source implementation of the X Window System. BTW, imagine what had happened if back in the day there were no XFree86 Project. No KDE, no GNOME, no desktop Linux, no X.org, ... and in a few days many people is forgetting about what the XFree86 Project has done and is keep doing... Well, NetBSD hasn't forgetted it as they're shipping it (among others). Patrick has thanked XFree for everything they have done. And don't forget that Slackware Linux has recently changed to X.org
> 1. Linux was documented to be installed on at
> least 25% of all machines, with that number
> increasing
So why again do people change their browser version to "IE" or worse, actually use their Windows partitions to browse around the web, when the browser/OS fingerprint they leave in the web server logs are likely *the most important vote* they can make in favor of Linux??
Back in the day, Apple did a series of time/motion studies regarding mousng vs. command keys and command lines. They showed that (for the tasks they studied, of course) in IIRC all casees, the GUI was faster,
Yeah, of course they did. They were selling computers with GUI, in competition with computers command lines.
Isn't it remarkable that research by Microsoft shows Linux is more expernsive that Windows, research from Apple shows that GUIs are faster, and research from ExxonMobil shows that buring fossil fuels doesn't cause global warming?
Here's a task; delete all files containing the word "flibble" in a directory.
Okay, here's a task: delete all files containing the word "flibble" that are not refering to the "flibble meeting" you were in last week with Jane, Joe, and John, in all directories under your home directory on your local box, your personal backup directory on the network, your department's shared resources directory, and the network directory for the most recent project you've been working on.
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damn why didnt i see how this could be a slashdot article when i was reading the daily slackware changelog updates!
Well there's no real doubt that for most tasks GUI is faster. If your tools are right there in front of you, it makes it quicker and more intuitive.
However, "most tasks" being the key phrase. Administration and that type of thing is much easier and quicker once I hit a command prompt.
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