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Mandrakelinux Goes X.org
dvalin writes "With Mandrakelinux now going for X.org it seems like every big linux distributor now has officialy dumped XFree86.
First release for cooker was announced on the changelog list the 7th of June:
http://archives.mandrakelinux.com/changelog/2004-0 6/msg00799.php
Nice to see for all us cookers out there:)
Also on another note, Mandrakelinux has also switched to gcc-3.4 now"
People are switching to X.org due to liscence incompatbilities of XFree86 with the GPL.
Actually, Xorg is just a fork of XFree86 right before the licence change.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Probably is going to take awhile for unstable. Debian doesn't move X-Window System into unstable until it gets it running on all supported platforms.
There probably will be unofficial ports long before that, though.
Je ne parle pas francais.
GCC is still 3.4.0.
GCC 3.4.1 is targeted for June 15.
This page probably can.
blah
Xorg is a fork of XFree86 due to a change in licensing on XFree86 software. Apparently the XFree license has had a 'marketing/advertising' clause added to it which may make it incompatible with the GPL. That was the straw that broke the camel's back..... From what I've read, their has been a lot of friction for a long time between XFree leadership and development community for various reasons (too many to list here). You can get the details about Xorg from here.
Its great to see another distro adopt x.org as the cornerstone of their distro.
When XORG 6.7.0 was released, to put it midely, i was running around the house naked celebrating with great joy knowing that finally X11 will be bought kicking and screaming into the 21st century in regards to performance.
With the heavy weight of the distros plus SUN, hopefully SUN will stop having their own in house X server and instead adopt the XORG. What this should mean is greater enhancements coming to Solaris and all platforms that rely on XORG.
What I am disappointed in, however, is the lack of movement by FreeBSD to getting XORG working. A known bug that has been sitting in bugzilla since last month still hasn't been fixed, whats taking FreeBSD so long?!
and replace
blah
Tom.
Oh arse
OpenBSD for one is likely to change. They were one of the biggest opponents of the new XFree86 license.
The reasoning for why the new license sucks has absolutely nothing to do with the GPL, despite the uninformed ramblings of the Slashdot crowd. It has to do with practicality. The new XFree86 license is almost impossible to follow depending on your interpretation. The license itself is unclear, and instead of fixing the wording, XFree86 leaders have just made informal statements on mailing lists regarding their own personal interpretation.
The new license is impractical because it requires that attribution to be given to the XFree86 developers wherever any other attribution is given to another party. OpenBSD's complaint was with CD covers. Say you put a "Artwork provided by Foo Bob" on the CD insert. Now, according to some interpretations of the XFree86 license (and these are valid interpretations, because the license wording is very ambiguous and vague) you'd also have to put there in the same font size and prominance, "X Window system provided by XFree86, Inc." Then, if a contributor adds some stuff to the project under the same license, you have to add their name as well. And the next contributor. And so on. Pretty soon you run out of space to put all of these. There's also potential for the license to "spread" as people lift code, resulting a wide variety of apps with hundreds if not thousands of authors that have this incredibly stupid licensing stipulation.
The XFree86 developers have stated that the above scenario is not their intention. But what they say doesn't matter much, because the above is pretty much exactly what the license text implies.
WTF are you talking about ???
X.org is an X server, which is similar to what you have inside your NCD thing (except the NCD is stuck at XFree86 4.1.x
X.org itself doesn't communicate with your NCDs, the Xlib in your server does (where the X applications, also known as X clients, reside).
the xlib that comes with X.org does not break compatibility, and still uses the core X protocol (it's X11R6.x), otherwise, it wouldn't be an X 11 library.
Now, your NCD things are flash upgradable. you should kick NCD in the nuts for not making a newer firmware available for that expensive hardware you use.
As for us, we have switched from NCD based X servers to EPIAs booting from the network with PXE...
"Is it compatible with the XFree86 config files?"
:-).
Yes. I simply copied my XFree86 config file over to the new name.
No changes I'm aware of to configuration methods yet, so it's probably not "better" in that sense. However, now that things are more open, if support develops for some better method that's proposed there's every chance it could happen
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
As I said, You don't know what you are talking about. the core stuff won't EVER change, all new stuff goes into these really practical things called "X extensions" which are some sort of plugins that can be used when available, or simulated if not present.
now, stop trolling and go do your homework before whining, you have a lot to read on xorg.freedesktop.org
Since XOrg will be replacing XFree, APT dependencies will have a "Replaces: xserver-xfree86" field along with the "Conflicts:" field. Don't worry, things like this happen more often than you think.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Solution: Spawn of Debian. Take what is probably the best distro out there and preconfigure it and add some administration utilities and you get the best of both worlds. Examples: MEPIS, Knoppix, Lindows (Linspire), the late Corel Linux, etc...
If X.ORG is marked as conflicting with XFree86, then apt will uninstall XFree86 for me -- along with everything that depends on it. KDE, Gnome, all my X applications... ack!
Assuming you're using Debian (since you mentioned apt), those packages don't depend on XFree86. They depend on one or more of the X11 library packages, which at present are built from the XFree86 sources. A hypothetical future Debianized x.org will provide the same packages, thus ensuring that the dependencies continue to be satisfied. No applications should require rebuilding, because the XFree86 libraries and x.org libraries provide the same API.
Personally, I'm not touching x.org until it gets as far as Debian's testing stream. The XFree86 server and libraries in Debian testing Work For Me(tm), so I'm in no hurry to replace them just because.
-Stephen