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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.
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/
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.
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
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...
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
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?