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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.
What are the differences between XFree86 and X.org, besides the liscences and names? I havnt really had any experiences with X.org
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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
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
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.
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
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 ?
"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
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.
> Some people on the XFree86 Forum list claim it's the vendors using Xorg for their own interests.
... fine. You can make a statement that you won't support proprietary drivers (not so), that you'll only support a certain interface (pretty much true), and so on, but you can't just sit there and refuse to take perfectly good patches WITHOUT COMMENT.
Speaking as someone who used a vendor that XF86 ignored for years and years
Good riddance to bad rubbish. I for one welcome my new conspiratorial corporate overlords, whoever they are.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
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?