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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?
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.
I've been using X.org with Dropline Gnome and Slackware 9.1. The only problem that I've had is with the XV overlay support. It seems to have been broken with any card except for the non-DRI nVidia hardware. I hear that this has been a problem with XFee86 since before the X.org fork of the 4.4 PRE release.
Be prepared for a few XV overlay headaches if you don't use nVidia hardware. Other than that, it is fast and quite stable.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
> 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.
Not really, two different sets of people. Set one is distro maintainers and developers. They care about Free Software. Set two is gamers who just 'have' to have the best framerate and buy the latest and greatest card and couldn't care less about licenses. After all, they are playing closed games so why not a closed video driver.
As for me, the fastest video card on the planet is the ATI Radeon 9200, although I realize there are newer cards available for Windows and other closed and hybrid platforms.
Democrat delenda est
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
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.
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
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