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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 ..."
There are people running Slackware that use a GUI?
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
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
Switched to X11R6.7.0 from X.Org. Thanks to those who sent comments to /pub/slackware/unsupported/ directory on the FTP site.
x@slackware.com. Seems the community has spoken, because the opinions were
more than 4 to 1 in favor of using the X.Org release as the default version
of X. I think I've heard just about every side to this issue now, and it was
only after careful consideration and testing that this decision was made.
It's primarily (as is usual around here) a technical decision. Nearly
everyone else is going with X.Org and it seems to me that sticking with
XFree86 it spite of this would be asking for compatibility trouble (indeed,
we saw some issues between X.Org and XFree86 4.4.0 until a few things in
XFree86 were patched). I also noticed that the ATI Radeon binary drivers
designed for XFree86 4.3.0 do not work with XFree86 4.4.0, but do work with
the X.Org release. Something I'm *not* in favor of is dragging around two
nearly identical projects, so XFree86 4.4.0 has been moved to the
I'd like to take this moment to thank the XFree86 Project for all the truly
amazing work they've done all these years, and to wish the project the best
of luck. Slackware owes the XFree86 Project a debt of gratitude and will
always include the XFree86 acknowledgement, even if we are no longer
shipping XFree86.
it seems the reason is for compatibility since other distros are moving to X.org too, not because of the license change
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
The long national nightmare is over! Finally, I can sleep easily, knowing that all those years of intensive study have been recognized, and in some way, appreciated.
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
Apparently ATI drivers from XFree 4.3.0 work with X.Org
Which version of X does OS X use?
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?
:(){
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.
Slackware... The official Linux distro of the Klingon Empire!
This was in Slackware-current, the development branch of Slackware.
Slackware 9.1 (the last official release of Slackware) uses XFree86 4.3.0.
The next release of slackware will be using X.org's X server.
Now that we've got a stable, mature, and well rounded XServer...
:)
Fuck it, let's make a new one.
I know everything you can possibly flame me for in this post, It's a joke. mod me funny
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
That wierd sort of rattling? Yeah. That's the sound of the open source development process functioning properly... ^_^
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
They're just being conservative, they don't like to change things that work without making sure the replacement works as well.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
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.
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.
X.org is stuck with XFree86 4.4 rc2 and I see no development of this project
Tha's becuase you're not looking. The XDamage and XFixes extensions from Keith Packard's xserver project are already integrated into x.org's code, and they're working on getting the compositing code integrated with the rest of it. Together those extensions will lay the groundwork for flashy high-performance graphics like Apple's Quartz Extreme, or Microsoft's Longhorn in X11. All of these are new features that were either turned down by the XFree "leaders", or written by programmers they had driven away from the project in the past.
Who develops X.org? Who??
Mostly developers that got fed up with the glacial pace of XFree.
XFree86 is about to issue 4.5 alpha soon
Which is really just the current release with a few bugfixes and minor driver updates, like every release XFree has made since 4.0.0.
Widespread adoption of X.org Server could also lead to the full integration of auxilliary X.org projects, such as Xinerama, into X11 as standard features.
X.org Server is the MIT/X license's flagship product (in an inverse sort of way), so I think it's also a good possibility that the systematic proliferation of X.org's server may magnify the popularity of its license among OSS developers in general (it's an interesting license!).
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.
I had to upgrade my FreeBSD desktop from XFree86 4.3 to 4.4 to get my Radeon 9200 to work. Know what? It took about ten minutes and entailed downloading a bunch of packages and running the install script. Not a big problem.
It's true that noobies and most people who don't really care about the GUI will stick with whatever is the default but I'm simply not worried about compatibility. As always (in the *nix world) we have a choice.
From user land, are there any visible differences?
Steve
Slackware has an upgrade system?
I always thought it was more like: backup old files, format, install new version with new package, get used to new machine.
Either that or compile from source.
Both are time-consuming and tedious, but nice once you're done. They aren't that helpful, though, when - for instance - Thunderbird requires a newer version of glibc than that against which everything else on your system was compiled. This is one of the reasons why I'm still using Mozilla 1.3.1 and Netscape 4.7 for web and mail.
Pisses me off. And then BitTorrent works almost regardless as long as I have python available. Stable APIs are nice.
I could recompile Thunderbird for my system, but then we're back to tedious and time-consuming.
</vent>
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
Just what we need, another rift between OSS projects, making it a potential PR nightmare "see, those OSS guys cant cooperate on anything and have multiple subsystem 'standards'" "choose us, we have one consistent standard ".
" they even cant decide on their desktop, they have silly looking feet and strange K-menus " " and a thousand other incompatible, duplicated efforts "
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.
Disclaimer: I'm a FBSD user, and do use KDE... but I can see how this can be twisted around easily in the press.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
See also what KeithP & Co. does in -CURRENT. This is their to do list. Release notes.
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
Nope. Fonts are in /usr/share/fonts instead of usr/lib/X11R6/fonts (or whatever it was), and the config file in /etc/X11/ is named xorg.conf instead, but these aren't things a typical user will notice or care about.
The only overt difference is that it seems slightly faster.
Just as an alternative (not Slackware related) data point, I'm using X.org on Fedora 2 x86-64 with an ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 and XVideo overlay DOES work, although it's much slower than it was on Fedora 1 using ATI's proprietary drivers. Unfortunately ATI has not yet seen fit to release 64-bit linux drivers. That said, I'm pretty happy that XV works at all... on my last laptop, it took several months before XV support for that card made it into XFree86.
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...
I use cygwin on a daily basis, was nice to see that on an upgrade it removed all of Xfree and upgraded to X.org X11 server.
Seems everyone is ditching Xfree. (About damn time too!)
BTW, those use mentioned screen because they don't want to use a mouse. There are X window managers like EvilWM or Ratpoison that are mouseless. Though, my favorite WM is IceWM with the PicoGUI theme. Though I like to modify it with additional buttons. Freshmeat has a ton of themes for it.
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.
I have tried many other distros. I personally stick with slackware because it is somuch easier to set up and configure the way that I want to. I don't have to worry about breaking crap all the time and it isn't released until it is stable, unlike most of the other bug ridden distros. If you haven't used slack in five years you have no clue what you are talking about.
Currently, you won't notice a difference, except the package names. Everything else is essentially the same, including files, their locations, config files, etc.
--- d'oh
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.
I migrated from xfree86 to X.org easily following the guide here. Basically, unmerge xfree and xfs, emerge xfs and xorg-x11, and copy XF86config into /etc/xorg.conf
Install from scratch instructions can be found here.
I noticed that I am getting better performance with my Radeon Mobile 9200 with X.org than with XFree86.
Mak'tal shree lok'tak mek'ta sa'tak Oz! - Daniel Jackson
hey man sendmail is the best MTA ever coded.
Props to GNAA!
the license changed in XFree86, and it's now too restrictive for most distributions. (i think) slackware's fine with the new license, but since everyone else is switching (and there will be differences between the two in the future), they're switching for compatibility reasons.
this will have almost no impact on the end-user... it might just change the location of a few config files, or at worst, temporarily break compatibility with binary drivers from some manufacturer(s).
upgradepkg *.tgz has always worked more cleanly for me than any rpm upgrade. it also keeps /var/log/packages nice and clean (free from redundancies) if you always upgrade rather than just install new packages.
Golden Rule: upgradepkg --install-new *.tgz
(if package to be upgraded is not installed, install and proceed)
I love Slack...
Acquiescence leads to obliteration
didn't Debian already?
Nope, Debian is still going strong with XFree86...XFree86 4.1, to be exact (in the stable distribution anyway...unstable just got up to 4.3 a couple months ago). In 10 years or so when they do update the X11 server it will probably be to X11R6.7, but that is a long way off.
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.
http://cltracker.net -- powerful craigslist multi-city search
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?
My god, four cliches in one sentence.
No comment.
X.org has lame little dropshadows everywhere.
.Xresources will use the core cursor functionality rather than alternate alpha-blended cursors.
XFree86 has RENDER capabilities as well. In any event, these are toggleable.
Xcursor.core: true in your
From the same guy that fucked up Xft.
Keith Packard *designed* Xft, so if you don't like his work, you don't like Xft. I think that few people would complain too much about Xft/fontconfig -- it provides significant functionality that the old X11 stuff didn't, including more advanced rendering, user-installable fonts, a font-selection system that doesn't scare regular users, etc.
May we never see th
Today Nmap confirmed that XFree86 is dying....
What option to do you need to supply to nmap to have it obtain that information?
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
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/
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.
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
damn why didnt i see how this could be a slashdot article when i was reading the daily slackware changelog updates!