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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"
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.
can someone explain the benefits to me in real terms? performance?
What are the differences between XFree86 and X.org, besides the liscences and names? I havnt really had any experiences with X.org
anyone knows if/when x.org will make it to debian experimental/unstable ?
i don't want to build mine because the next apt-get dist-upgrade may overwrite x.org with xfree86, so i'm waiting for the packages. i just want to know how long i'll have to wait.
What ? Me, worry ?
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?
XFree86 project was scuicided and this is what happens. :) Personally, any change for the better including new implementations and speed enhancements will do everyone good.
Speaking of which, this is off topic, but has anyone gone x.org for their own machines and if so, what's the smallest compiled binaries sizes (total X install) you've come up with? I'm looking at working with DamnSmallLinux and the smaller the better, or straight out integration (unless that's pure evil)
Post some replys, I'd love to hear from everyone.
Looks like XFree86 has a bad management staff. If companies and people all start jumping ship you fix why they are all doing it. It's simple business.
Evolution or ID?
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
XFree86.org changes a few words in their license, and within four months almost every major Linux distribution and BSD has dumped it. How much longer does it have left? I'd guess by the end of the year the team will be disbanded as the independant OSS people move to x.org. Oh well, I never like the name XFree86, especially after it was ported to other architectures (XFree68? XFreePPC? :)
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Nowadays?! It has always been this way, and it will always be this way. These are the dynamics of a lot of intelligent, strong willed people working together, albeit in a loose an relatively disconnected manner.
feh. stuff.
The XFree86 process has been dysfunctional for quite some time with politics dominating. A fork was probably imminent either way. This is natural selection at work, and shows why open source is an effective model.
In the keyboard section you have to replace XkbRules "xfree86" with XkbRules "xorg"
GCC is still 3.4.0.
GCC 3.4.1 is targeted for June 15.
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?!
it seems like every big linux distributor now has officialy dumped XFree86
But is XFree86 actually dumped? Surely their future work (even if it does come out slowly) will continue to be utilised by X.org. And right now all they've done is fork a version of XFree86 anyway. In effect everyone is still using XFree86, and unless X.org has some kind of wild new direction planned, it doesn't look like much is going to change for users. Bah. It's all too political and boring.
and replace
blah
If you haven't had any problems with XFree86 for the past 10 years, then you haven't *really* used it :P
01100111 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00101110
Is it compatible with the XFree86 config files?
God knows we don't want to have to write another X server config file by hand after finaly getting one to work.
Or perhaps, X.org is just better so we won't have so much trouble.
I've not used X.org yet, so I can only ask others.
Less look fast, more go fast.
Tom.
Oh arse
The original was named X386 (yes, after an intel 386). Also I should say XFree86 was named "Free" not because it was , but because it rhymed with three.
And that's how it ended upQuidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
pssst.. it's "of" not "off"
Maybe he means "of and only of". You never know.
I don't know about FreeBSD, but NetBSD choose to go with XFree86 4.4, OpenBSD would not accept the license. Currently OpenBSD uses are pre-release of 4.4 from just before the new license was introduced. I don't think the OpenBSD teams has decided what to do yet.
One thing which was nice about xfree86 is that is was very crossplatform, so it ran under linux, *bsd, solaris (etc) and on i386, ppc, arm etc. How will this be with x.org? Any plans?
In case the parent post is a little confusing, Fedora Core 2 uses Xorg as the X-server and XFCE is one of the available WMs (along with the usual Gnome, KDE etc).
:)
I'd have to agree that XFCE is a very compact, tidy and high-performance WM. Great for low-end boxes and even power-users who don't want to loose potential gaming resources to a WM
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
and shows why open source is an effective model
Not so, it only shows that open source is an effective model IF these transitions occur smoothly and the destination is found to be worthy the journey.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
The package revision is 0.1mdk. That means it is not yet the first real release of the package, but a pre-release. The changelog also clearly indicates it is a CVS copy of GCC. Once GCC 3.4.1 is officially out, and the package has been stabilized, the package release will become 1, and increase as other changes/improvements are made to the package.
It shows how open source is effective for the consumer, not for nessesarly for the producer. It also shows basic market economy, company makes bad product, consumers switch. This is how things should work, but generally don't in a more locked in system that is generally produced in closed source.
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.
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.
Not true, because through the process of natural selection if the fork is -not- worthy very few if any will switch to it and the product will wither and die.
... far more effective than bying a commercial product that decides to make changes that aren't compatible with your setup and then saying "too bad, you have to upgrade, you might want to change you setup".
If the transition isn't smooth then selection will be slowed until the transition has taken place. If the destination isn't worthy after transition, people still won't switch.
Sounds effective to me
Is it perfect? Nope, I think the Universe has an if() loop that states if anyone finds the perfect one-size-fits-all business model it then transfers the rights to the supreme being and ends the experiment. However, it is still quite effective.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
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 ?
Right now X.Org is mostly a code cleanup of the last GPL-friendly XFree86. That will change eventually. I'm running X.Org at home, and there were very few changes. The advantage right now is that you're running something somewhat close to latest-greatest XFree86, except that it's undergone some minor changes.
It's not just the minor licensing issue: XFree86 moves at a snail's pace, and it's not from lack of people trying to change it. Hopefully we'll see some modernisation, and new features designed to take advantage of modern hardware.
I for one welcome the change.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Apple released X11, an X-windowing system based on XFree86. I wonder if X11 will change also.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
Funny how Xfree86, which started as a liberal spin-off of the "de jure" X Foundation, only to become the de facto standard for this foundation later on, now finds itself buried in bureaucracy and licensing problems, and getting passed by, no other than, the "new, exiting" X.org foundation.
:-)
(Lots of letters and commas in that sentence
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Actually, instead of "XF86Config-4", the standard name is now "xorg.conf".
Nvidia works fine for now. That said they would be very stupid to support XFree86 any further with all those nice eyecandy waiting to happen in xorg. I am confident that they will see the benefit in xorg and abandon XFree86
How does all this affect X as distributed on non-x86 platforms? Apple's X11 app is based on XFree86, but what about X as it comes with Solaris, AIX, et al. Does IBM, Sun, etc. write their own, which conforms to the X spec, or are they in some way beholden to what happens with the XFree86 project? I don't know why I thought this, but I was under the assumption that the XFree86 project represented "official" development of X going forward, after MIT stopped working on it.
Some people on the XFree86 Forum list claim it's the vendors using Xorg for their own interests.
This guy is way out there
If Xfree was cross platformable, then I don't see why x.org wouldn't be. Remember, it's a fork. Think Xfree86 + improvements + future updates
"We're breaking out the ramen noodles. . . "
"Really? Is it someone's birthday?"
My experience at HP was eye-opening in this regard, Sun is even worse.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
So what has the XFree86 project's reaction been to this? They'll have noticed the defectors to X.org like everyone else. Are they contrite or defiant?
Good names really do help grease the wheels.
When we forked Inkscape from Sodipodi, we gave a lot of careful thought to branding, and over the course of the project it's paid off in a lot of small ways.
Of course branding doesn't determine the long-term success of a project; there are a lot of successful projects which are even agressively BADLY branded (e.g. GIMP, or (IMO) Sodipodi). Long-term a project stands or falls by its technical, legal, and organizational merits.
But in the short term branding is often the thing that gives you those little critically needed boosts at the right times.
Don't think that cuddly penguin hasn't helped Linux.
DNA just wants to be free...
XF86 isn't broken, it isn't slow when compiled right either(okay only gentoo does it right all the time).
It is quite broken. You know when they added multi-moniter support, it broke the extension for hardware video? To get around it, they hacked it so it only works on the primary screen.
How about how Xine has to simulate a keypress every so often to prevent the screensaver from coming on? That, my friends, is a hack.
It has several advanced features that no other GUI system uses. Transparent network support at the top of the list.
That doesn't make up for anything. Fans always bring this up. "B-but, it's network-transparent!" Y-Windows is network transparent too.
That's right you don't have to load a whole desktop to use one app you can just load the app.
Uh, hello? I have to install both entire desktop libraries and base packages. That's what I was talking about. Read, learn, comprehend. I have to install KDE's base system to be able to run some app that happened to be coded for KDE. Instead of implementing one sane development library, a bunch of idealists have decided the more choice, the better--having absolutist views and applying them to everything is why Linux is still only at 1% of usage on Google Zeitgeist. The nearest is OS X up about 4 points (so much for that article declaring that Linux desktop usage would surpass the Mac...).
"Sufferin' succotash."
It's not a question of can read. It's a question of want to read.
SuSE is nice because a new user can set a basic install and get a nice desktop with all the bells,whistles,chameleons, and penguins a person could ever want.
Truth be told, some people are just scared of command lines or editiing system filse (and i think there's a reason for that. Nothing like overwriting fstab accidently to really make a new user say 'this is fun, i'm convinced')
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
It's just a fact of life, not an insult. Large companies tend to have a frustrating level of internal politics and bureaucracy that work against productivity. I doubt there's any company of that size that doesn't have such problems.
Of course, smaller companies can have this problem too - all you need is one politician. But, the smaller the group, the larger the chance that people can work together in a happy and efficient way.
-If
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
"Not so, it only shows that open source is an effective model IF these transitions occur smoothly and the destination is found to be worthy the journey."
Not really. The fact is that ALL of the choices available for proprietary software are STILL there in open-source. It's just that you also have MORE choices. So, even if this choice is not good in this situation, all of the other choices still exist.
However, I am sure that the transition will be smooth. Why? BECAUSE NOTHING HAS CHANGED YET. Because of open-source, switching vendors does not mean that you have to change even a single line of code in your system. With the proprietary model, switching vendors means completely wrecking existing infrastructure. In those cases, your questions are valid. In this case, switching to X.org isn't really changing anything yet, just switching vendors.
Engineering and the Ultimate