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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 ..."
This rocks, I've been using X.org on my slackware-current system all along. With kernel 2.6.6, even. Works fantastic. I just played a few rounds of UT2004 as well. Woo hoo!
FLR
Internal Politics triumphed over project development in the XFree86. The future of open source X windows system lies is xorg branch, plus they'll be integrating pretty exciting stuff from Keith P's exciting new FD.o project which will be able to give longhorn run for it's money. I am really looking forward to the kdrive stuff. So Xfree has grown out of it's usefulness and like any rudiments in evolutionary process, it must wither away.
Activists United
Have you ever tried screen?
Sick of people knocking on Gentoo's greatness in completely unrelated
I don't understand what Dawes' problem is. Why would he change the license such that a) no distros want to use the software, and b) no one wants to develop the software? It seems to me like he signed his own death warrant.
Why didn't he just back down? It is totally boggling to me, since it is quite obvious that within a year the XFree86.org X server will now not only not be in use by anyone, but also be totally obsolete.
Why did Slackware and NetBSD stick to XFree98 4.4.0 to begin with ?
Sunny Dubey
Which version of X does OS X use?
I run X with fluxbox on my laptop, but the rest of my machines at home don't even have monitors or keyboards. ;-)
At any rate, can't be surprised with this decision. Power to the people, down with crappy licenses.
Actually, interestingly enough, the only dot file in the /etc/skel directory that populates user's home directories is .screenrc. So GNU screen is well supported in Slackware. :-)
Well, technically it's not really a fork.. it's the official X source release which XFree86 uses as a base, but X.org merged in the XFree86 changes back into their trunk. so if you think about it, xFre86 was the fork.. now things are going back to the source.
I think the license is just the last straw. By itself, the license may not been that big a deal, but the XFree86 leadership has been doing a lot to piss off developers, avoid enhancements, and turn XFree86 into a stagnant project for quite a while now.
Of course there are. One of the many strengths of the distribution has long been that it has great X packages. Always fast and stable, and they don't try to shove 'desktops' down your throat with it. Want GNOME? Fine, there's a great package. But if you'd rather run twm or WindowMaker or something and skip that crap, you can. Of course you can with other distros too, but sometimes it can be a lot of work. Not so with slack.
And the packages really are top quality - I remember back when all the major distros were shipping KDE libraries with debugging info compiled in, which made it take like 10 times the memory it should have - but slack had it right. As always.
I really don't know why folk think it's somehow a difficult or 'unfriendly' distro. Friendliest I've ever seen, and I've tried most of them.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
"I would bet many will continue on using xfree86"
.1% of the Linux marketshare. I mean, have you _ever_ heard of anyone putting any serious effort into supporting MetroX or AcceleratedX? Of course not. Those X servers didn't hurt Linux, and neither will XF86.
Why? Every major distro has switched at this point. New distributions are almost always forks ("derivatives") of popular distributions (typically RH/Fedora, Slack, or Debian), so it's unlikely that any new distributions are going to be using XF86.
If other older, less popular distros keep using it, who cares? No one's going to waste time supporting XF86 if it only has
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
They're just being conservative, they don't like to change things that work without making sure the replacement works as well.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that the 1.1 license is incompatible with the BSD license, and since NetBSD is under that license there is no problem, it may change later on to use Xorg and I'm sure it will because no operating system is really using XFree 4.4.
As for Slackware, I think they were going to change to Xorg anyway, but I think they weren't in a hurry to but the users speed up the change.
I think he did the only logical thing and purposely sabotaged the project. When he saw the abysmal state of XFree86 development compared to the rest of the free software community, and the exodus of mindshare to various other projects, he decided to sink the ship and get all those on board to a different project with a better community.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
And have the first Naba Barkakati IDG book right here, Linux Secrets, with the flames. Great book, still refer to it.
Tried RedHat (InfoMagic Workgroup Server, where is that guy?), Suse, LibraNet, still go back to Slackware, it just works. Luv it for my business, ties all those nasty Windows versions together.
Slackware's a great distro for the hacker set to pull a custom machine together with.
I use it all the time, generally just to get a base linux system on a box, and then customize from there.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Anyone who tries to claim that XFree86 development hasn't been damn near stagnant for the past several years is on something.
Put in the hands of a proper OPEN development system X will move MUCH faster than it did with the previous maintainers.
they still work but their still pitiful. Frankly this is off topic but I just wish that ATI could just put more heart into their drivers like Nvidia does. I've read that they are writing from scratch the win32 opengl driver. Is it that hard to get some crazy linux driver developpers?
I'm glad that slack switched to X.org. Doing the DropLine-Gnome update, I accepted to update everything thus replacing Xfree 4.4 by X.org and everything works smoothly, and I for one welcome our new and improved system to remind them that I am satisfied.
gnu screen has a "split" screen feature, which allows you to split the screen horizontal subsections, thus allowing you to see multiple screens at the same time. it's not perfect, but it's sufficient for my purposes.
In addition to what previous respondants said, the main reason that Slack switched to X.org is because they want to maintain compatibility with the other major distributions out there. X.org's server has a more rapid development model than XFree86's, and since the license change, just about all major Linux vendors have jumped ship. So even if X.org is behind XFree86 right now (which it isn't, incidentally, but that's a different argument), it will breeze swiftly past it in the near future.
--AC
Not really meaning to be an off-topic troll (or, maybe I am, I'm not really sure yet), but which video card do you suggest that I buy then?
I think that my ATI All-In-Wonder 9700 is crapping out (something with the DVI output, I need to do some troubleshooting). What should I replace it with?
I want something that will do fast 3D (with only open source accelerated drivers), and give me decent 2D as well. Since I'm buying a new card, it has to be at least as powerful as the 9700. Oh, and I'd much rather buy it retail than have to search eBay for it.
Any suggestions?
(Okay, that came off as trollish... But seriously, I think that there might be something with my video card, and I want a replacement that will work nicely with Linux).
-- Joe
With the recent changes and the inclusion of a 2.6 kernel (and udev) I would anticipate a new Slackware release in the next month. (good or bad) Gnome 2.6 was included a few weeks ago. Shortly afterwards, the 2.6.6 kernel and udev. Now X.org...I see Slackware 10.0
As for a reason WHY still use Slackware? I can download and install two CDs (just slightly over 1). The configuration makes sense. While the community isn't quite as strong as the Gentoo users, there is a decent group at www.linuxpackages.net and on the irc channel. It does NOT default to a graphical boot screen. Withing 30 minutes on a relatively fast machine I can have a fully functional system. Windows would still be at the detection stage, Fedora/Redhat? Hell it might be asking for disk 399/500.
Yes I'll keep my simple distro. I've been a Slacker since 94...tried others but keep coming back to the best distro around...
Not that I don't agree with switching to Xorg, because I do. I think Xorg is the way to go and xfree is totally dying.
BUT
Isn't it funny that a very small license change in a free program like Xfree drives everyone away within months. But NVidia binary drivers, which I use and love, have a license 10 times worse. But people don't avoid using them. In fact just from the gentoo forums there are tons of people trying to get said drivers to work with Xorg! Most have actually had great success.
Funny stuff.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I think the main point behind the post was not the popularity or "bleeding edge" factor of Slackware. It was that Slackware is, in fact, intentionally *not* bleeding edge. The reason that it has a loyal user base is that it's extremely stable and covers mostly just the fundamentals. For a distribution like this to switch to X.org instead of XFree86, says something about the stability and "standardness" (making up words is fun) of X.org.
To be honest, the closed-source drivers are *better* than what FOSS alternatives offer at this time for Nvidia and ATI. ("But they close their specs!" -- yes they do, but you're geeks right?) If you use a particular card because there are just FOSS drivers avaialable, that's one thing -- if you're deciding to cut out functionality for open drivers, that's totally philisophical and not a technical decision. For those who actually play games on Linux (or FreeBSD in compatibility mode), those evil closed source drivers sure kick the stuffing out of anything in the FOSS community.
If you want to see a shift towards FOSS drivers, the DRI project would appreciate your help. If you want Free to dominate, you need to give people a better decision. Mod me down if you will as anti-FOSS, but I'm not going to sugar coat it.
Karma whorin' since 1999
ATI and nVidia don't care about Linux users at all. Linux users don't make up enough of a marketshare for them to care. The binary drivers are provided merely as a dangling carrot to appease people.
The only way that nVidia and/or ATI would open up their drivers is if:
1. Linux was documented to be installed on at least 25% of all machines, with that number increasing, or,
2. Somebody paid them a ton of money.
The rumor that I heard is that the driver for the Promise TX2 SATA-150 cards/chips was opened because some people bought tons of Promise cards, to leverage Promise to release the driver GPL'd (as seen on the Linux-Kernel Archive.
Until the Open Source community can do this, I just don't see open source drivers available for video cards, or even other hardware.
-- Joe
I don't think so.
Maybe you're right with the nVidia stuff, but only because there are no open source alternatives.
But when it comes to ATI, they're drivers are absolute CRAP. I had a Radeon 7200 ( a 64MB DDR VIVO card ) and was running XFree86-4.3.99-something. I could run Unreal Tournament 2004 ( demo ) at 800x600 with respectable performance ( I've got an Athlon 2100XP, by the way ). When I 'upgraded' to my Radeon 9600, I discovered, much to my horror, that it was based on an R350 chip, and the open source drivers don't support it yet. So I switched to ATI's drivers. Within 9 hours, my system had locked hard while running xscreensaver. I rebooted to see a list of 150 or so remnants of files that were being deleted. I have now disabled xscreensaver, hoping this will avoid constant lockups with the 3D part of the driver. When I play Unreal Tournament 2004 demo now, I can manage an amazing 800x600, with acceptable performance, with all the settings exactly the same. But now it crashes every 15 minutes or so. These drivers are absolute shit . The performance is something to be positively ashamed of, and the crashes
ATI's drivers are most certainly NOT 'kicking the stuffing out of anything in the FOSS community'. Quite the opposite, in fact. And if you disagree with me, I will gladly swap my POS Radeon 9600 with anything that has an R2xx chip ( so I can use some real drivers ), or even a bloody nVidia.
There's something to be said for having a clean layout to begin with, and not changing it - because it works. Slackware's installer has pretty much been the same since I chose it as my distro about 9 years ago. The expert mode got one little tweak which I love: You pick all the packages beforehand, then the installer goes through each set and installs them without further input.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
While Slackware's decision to use x.o may be a compatibility issue, the fact still remains that many other distros have ditched xfree86 for the licensing issue. What basically happens is that everyone starts using something new, because everyone is using something new. I think three things contributed to slackware's decision. 1) The ATI driver situation. 2) Compatibility between distros. 3) The licensing. I am fairly certain that 3, while not mentioned, had at least a minor role in the decision. It is the proverbial "elephant in the room".
I hate sigs.
Downloaded all the X11R6.7.0-src[1-7].tar.gz.
Extracted, went in an did "make World".
Fails with this:
ftfuncs.c: In function `FreeTypeRasteriseGlyph':
ftfuncs.c:962: `FT_GLYPH_FORMAT_BITMAP' undeclared (first use in this function)
ftfuncs.c:962: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
ftfuncs.c:962: for each function it appears in.)
ftfuncs.c:1085: `FT_RENDER_MODE_MONO' undeclared (first use in this function)
make[5]: *** [ftfuncs.o] Error 1
make[5]: Leaving directory `/tmp/x.org/xc/lib/font/FreeType'
make[4]: *** [FreeType] Error 2
make[4]: Leaving directory `/tmp/x.org/xc/lib/font'
make[3]: *** [all] Error 2
make[3]: Leaving directory `/tmp/x.org/xc/lib'
make[2]: *** [all] Error 2
make[2]: Leaving directory `/tmp/x.org/xc'
make[1]: *** [World] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/x.org/xc'
make: *** [World] Error 2
I tried download a new version of freetype2, building and installing that (freetype-2.1.8.tar.bz2) but that didn't help.
Web sight is unbelievably sketchy. Will my GeForce 2 MX work? Will nvidia's drivers work? What sort of hardware support is there? 3D acceleration? Does it integrate with DRM/DRI on linux?
So what is happening with Keith Packard's X server? I was really hoping that'd end up taking over the lot and X.org was only there to smooth migration. I've been told great things about Keith's X server, that it runs faster and takes up less memory, it just needs drivers support. I hope they're not just going to tack it on to the monolithic X server package.
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, however the command line users thought they were faster. The explanation de jure was that because your mind is more involved in typing, it seems like less time even though it's more.
Naturally, it depends on what you're doing. I once watched a saleswoman with exactly 1 month's training on computers use the NeXT Interface Builder to build a complete calculator application with working buttons in about 15 minutes, including generating the necessary C functions. All that had to be done to complete the project was to put stuff like "return (B*A);" into the function for multiply, etc. OTOH, using a GUI to compose the algorithm for a complex physics function would probably be counterproductive.
This was back in the early-mid 1980's so I really don't recall the details.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Hopefully they'll release before the end of this year and they can show people linux in all it's 2002 glory!
Why is everyone obsessed with Debian making new releases all the time? They maintain three separate trees (stable, testing, unstable) for a reason, folks. Nothing magical happens when they "release" a new distro--if the stable branch is too old/outdated for you, go ahead and use testing or unstable instead (or continue to run stable, and just selectively install the packages you need to be bleeding edge from unstable).
#include <sig.h>
damn stright! I read the Xfree mailing-list around the time when Keith Packard was kicked out of Xfree. David Wexelblat was flaming Keith like there's no tomorrow. Now, Keith is just about the best thing that has happened to X in a long time. He was the one who made all those cool new features (like RENDER-extension). He was the one who was driving the developement of Xfree forward. And they kicked him out.
Who is this Wexelblat-guy who was flaming Keith? He's one of the guys who started Xfree and a member of the core-team. By his own admission, he doesn't hack Xfree anymore. He doesn't even USE Xfree anymore. He said that he uses Windows these days. Only X-related thing he does is that he lurks in the mailinglist.
Keith Packard gets kicked out, while useless deadbeats like Wexelblat are member of the Core. I'd say the sooner Xfree dies off, the better.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Sounds familiar.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
From what I can see, what has happened in most cases thus far is that distributions have stalled at/reverted to XFree86 4.3; they have not yet started installing the x.org codebase.
For instance, Debian is still running XFree86 4.3.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.