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Mandrakelinux Goes X.org

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the teaching-a-lesson dept.

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"

6 of 363 comments (clear)

  1. xorg changes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I don't understand why everyone is switching to x.org when it's known that there will be significant changes coming in the next couple of releases. It seems to me like that's begging for problems.

    1. Re:xorg changes by auzy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The reason isn't only because of the licensing, its also because Xfree86 was a badly managed project.. It was very common for programmers to write code which wasn't accepted (I heard for instance the cygwin coders spent a very long time coding patches which they refused to accept).

      They also moved slowly.. At the rate Xfree86 was going.. in 10 years maybe we'd be getting up to OS X level, but with xorg, I know a few people are working on the compositing already (the stuff needed for the translucent window effects and stuff), and libraries like cairo I'd imagine will be better utilised.

      So, many of the flames here I think are wrong, and are made by people who have no idea what the current situation is.. In fact, I'm betting that it will be a year tops until everyone here is thankful of the changes..

      I'm not a coder for Xorg, but I do hang around the channel alot, and have seen how fast Xorg is evolving (I do code though)

      Anyway, you want simple applications, and maybe a bit more stable server, go Xfree86.. If you want something, that is more cutting edge, can easily produce nice next generation effects that can surpass longhorn, Xorg is your best choice for the future.

      Haven't you noticed that nothing has visibly changed in X since the first accellerated ones came out, other then more drivers (lets face it, you could still run Xfree86 3.3 and get pretty much the same experience then now, if your drivers worked on it). Xorg however will add extensions that will finally make it worth while enough to be hoping for an upgrade.

  2. Are there any advantages other than licensing? by desplesda · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It seems to me that the major distros are all jumping to X.org because of the XF86 licensing issue. Are there any other advantages to X.org, or are distros just jumping to it over what looks like a quite trivial license change?

  3. Re:Differences? by Karamchand · · Score: 5, Interesting

    X.org is actively developed while XFree86 is only maintained at best because most high-profile X developers from XFree86 have changed to X.org.

  4. What does this mean for upgrading? by MobyDisk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Suppose that I have XFree86 4.2 or 4.3 on my system, and I've been happily using apt/yum/rpm to keep myself up-to-date. How difficult is it to switch to X.org?

    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!

    Or should I continue with XFree86 for a while? Obviously, my install tools don't care about license changes.

  5. How does this affect 3rd party drivers ? by farzadb82 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Will/Does the NVidia or ATI drivers work in x.org ? Will NVidia/ATI support future x.org upgrades, or will they continue to support xfree ?