First Experiences with X.org's X11 Server?

Slashdot Reader CanadianCrackPot decided to be adventurous and went and installed the latest offering from X.org's X-Server project. Below, you'll find "the basics" of his "first attempt to install [their] X Window Server on a system with a 450 MHz PIII, and Diamond Viper V770 (TNT2 chipset) graphics card, running Mandrake 10.0 Official (FTP download of everything but the RPMS.cooker dir)." To make a long story short, while he did have some luck with installing it, running it was...problematic. He asks: "I'm just wondering how other Slashdot readers are doing with the new X11R6 server, and more importantly, how did you install it?" "I decided to try installing X.org's X Server today while I had nothing to do here's the results:

• get a test bed system: check
• get sources: check
• ./configure: N/A...I'm worried
• make World: check
• make install; make install.man: check
• startx: crash
• xf86config: check
• startx, again: check -- now I need a manager
• startgnome: galeon not found (crash)
• startkde: crash"

If you've had any luck getting X.org's X-server running on your machine, what hurdles did you have to overcome before it worked?

Comments

Gentoo

[Gaima]

emerge x11-base/xorg-x11
emerge unmerge xfree

No crashes, no errors, no odd behaviour at all.

(Dell Dimension, P4 2.66, Matrox G400MAX, Matrox drivers, xinerama)

Re:Gentoo

[crstophr]

don't you mean:

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge x11-base/xorg-x11

You see, this is still in "unstable"...

Re:Gentoo

[superjaded]

Ew, that's bad.
echo "x11-base/xorg-x11" >>/etc/portage/package.keywords
(you'll have to do the same thing for things like utempter and xterm as well, since those are ~x86)
emerge -C xfree (xfree blocks xorg, so you have to uninstall first)
emerge xorg-x11

And as should be implied, if you already have an installation of xfree, the config file works with it out of the box. In fact, the config file generated from xorgconfig (which, incidentally, looks exactly like the XF86Config util) is pretty much the same as the one generated from the XF86Config util, save for a different header most likely ("This config file was generated" by blah).

But there's really no difference between the current X.org release and Xfree4.3.0 save for some patches that they have may have backported from 4.4. But I've been running X.org's implementation for quite a few months now and while I haven't noticed any significant difference between xfree and X.org at the moment.. that's not to say that will be the same as time goes on.

I think this "release" was mostly just to get the thing out of the door and get its name out there. The REAL cool stuff will be coming during the next releases. They're already trying to get the damage and composite extensions ported to the X.org tree. Those who've played around with KeithP's kdrive/Xserver have seen both of those extensions in action. Just imagining the composite extention in cooperation with something like cairo and glitz just makes me drool.

Slack-current xorg packages worked

[c.r.o.c.o]

I did not try to compile xorg, I just installed the default packages from Slack-current installed without any problems. Once that was done, I just renamed XF86Config to xorg.conf, and it worked without ANY problems. If I didn't know I had xorg instead XFree86, I couldn't tell the difference. This is obviously because for now they are virtually identical (other than a few different names).

If the packages are available for your distribution, give those a try to see if you have any incompatibilities. Compiling xorg is not easy, I remember it took me three tries in Gentoo (can't remember what was the problem, this was XFree86 4.1.0). In your case, something tells me that you wouldn't be able to compile XFree86 4.4.0 on your system either.

Fedora Core 2

[Joff_NZ]

I'm running X.org, by way of "upgrading" my FC1 install to FC2... a couple of problems: had to change the "XkbRules" option to "xorg".

Now I can't bind most of the multimedia keys to X keycodes. I expect this is related to the XkbRules thing.

Apart from that, its been running fine.

Re:Fedora Core 2

[prefect42]

Or just recompile the kernel with the 4k stacks option removed, or download the binaries that are available.

Re:i'm not sure

[Curtman]

It will parse XF86Config if xorg.conf isn't there. Just like XFree 4 would parse XF86Config if XF86Config-4 wasn't there.

# grep /X11/ /var/log/Xorg.0.log
(==) Using config file: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf"

No problems here here either. I was really expecting at least some, but nothing so far. Now hopefully Gatos will shift full on into Xorg, (patches exist already for Xorg & XFree 4.4.0) and merge in the TV-Out branch while we're at it. :)

At this point, the license

[Feztaa]

As noted in another post, X.org and XFree86 are basically identical code-wise. The only difference is that X.org has a more palatable license, which is why all the major distros switched over so quickly.

The other reason requires looking into the mysterious future... basically, politics at XFree86 were getting in the way of development, which was part of the reason for the fork; in 1 year's time, you can expect X.org to have a vibrant community of developers, with all funky new features in the X server, while XFree86 just sits and stagnates.

Read up about the X.org server