New, Modularized X Window Release Now Available for Download

By Leon Shiman, X.org -- X11R7.0 is the first release of the complete modularized and autotooled source code base for the X Window System. It is the first major version release of the X Window System in more than a decade. X11R6.9, its companion release, contains identical features and uses the exact same source code as X11R7.0, but uses the traditional imake build system. (Read the rest of the announcement below) These changes in source code management, which give openness and transparency to the source code base and employ current technology, invite a new generation of developers to contribute, building on the long tradition of the X Window System. The new modular format offers focused development and rapid, independent updates and distribution of tested modular components as they are ready, freed from the biennial maintenance release timetable.

X11R6.9 is comprised of many distinct components bonded in a single tree, based on imake. X11R7.0 splits that set of components into logically distinct modules, separately developed, built, and maintained by the community of X.Org developers. This simultaneous release gives a transition point for developers, builders, and vendors to adapt their practices to the new X.Org modular process.

X11R7.0 supports Linux and Solaris at this time, with other support pending. X11R7.1, the first modular roll-up release, is scheduled mid-2006. While the monolithic tree will continue to be fully supported and released, new feature development is expected to concentrate on the modular code base.

The X11R7.0 and X11R6.9 releases are the work of more than fifty volunteer contributors worldwide, working under the release management team of Kevin Martin (Head), Alan Coopersmith, and Adam Jackson, with the support of Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, and the unsupported, generous contribution of effort by Adam Jackson.

All X Window System Releases are available from ftp.X.Org and mirror sites worldwide (see http://wiki.x.org/Mirrors). They are distributed under the MIT ("X") License by the X.Org Foundation LLC. Information concerning organization, activities, and mailing lists can be found at www.X.Org. Membership is free and open to contributors. Sponsorship is encouraged to support the global activities of the X.Org Foundation. Current X.Org Sponsors include Sun Microsystems, HP, IBM, StarNet Communications, AttachmateWRQ, Hummingbird, and Integrated Computer Solutions Incorporated [ICS].

In continuous use for over 20 years, the X Window System provides the only standard platform-independent networked graphical window system bridging the heterogeneous platforms in today's enterprise: from network servers to desktops, thin clients, laptops, and hand-helds, independent of operating system and hardware.

* LINUX is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. "Solaris" is a trademark of Sun Microsystems. All company names are trademarks of their registered owners.

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Comments

Re:Fully Modular

[nitehorse]

When a vulnerability is found in libXpm, you won't have to download 15MB of fonts for the update to the library.

Also, drivers will now be released completely independently of the server. So you won't have to wait months for a new driver for your card; maybe a couple of weeks at most.

Re:Fully Modular

[squoozer]

AIUI at this stage not much really. In fact you could probably go as far as to say nothing. It does mean, though, that in the future it will be much easier to add new features and generally work on the code.

Re:Major version release?

[SoloFlyer2]

Major Realease only means that there was major code changes to get there...

Not that there were major new features added

Re:Fully Modular

[Spaceman40]

It means that it's easier to hack on, which means that new features should be easier to code, which means that they should come to the end user faster and with less bugs.

Emphasis on the shoulds.

Basically, this is a clean-up for the devs, which helps the end users indirectly.

Re:What this means

[ajaxxx]

Yes, it does. It means you get features, bug fixes and new hardware support as they get developed, rather than waiting for rollup releases every six months or so.

the correct mirror URL

[moocat2]

http://wiki.x.org/wiki/Mirrors

Re:platform-independent?

[nitehorse]

X.org builds and runs on more than just Linux/UNIX; it works on MacOS X's display server as well as on Windows and (at least at one point) OS/2.

So no, we won't drop the 'X is cross-platform' claim anytime soon. Thanks though.

Re:nVidia

[AnXa]

I think that at least couple months to get good EXA support from nVidia as they have to recode some parts their drivers. Expect faster compositation (more eye candy) with this release and better drivers. Also you can expect nv driver doing things what haven't never dream about. nv ships with the R7 so you don't have to wait support for it. 3dacceleration and nvidia. I guess you can use current drivers but I am not sure about them since we have now new acceleration architecture. nVidia has it's own system for this so I don't know if they will implement EXA or continue using their own systems. X will be somewhat faster too if I understood right everything on this page: http://wiki.x.org/wiki/ChangesSince68 that's the changelog and there are plenty of stuff to take a look at. :)

Re:Fully Modular

[QuantumG]

You seem to have missed the point. I was refering to EMACS.. an entire operating system running on top of another operating system just to edit text. X is similar, it has device drivers and schedulars and a network layer.. We run X as root and give it intimate access to the hardware that no userland program should have.

Re:Imake?

[msbsod]

X.org could learn a lot from NetBSD. The NetBSD makefiles are small and contain typically just the names of the source files and targets.

you're confused

[penguin-collective]

But I sure would like to know when X will support today's new technologies and trends. rotating your screen is very difficult. and you can't have accelleration when you do. even resolution changes are difficult (xrandr helps, but you still can only move between the resolutions provided at the X server start, which doesn't help if you've plugged in a different monitor.) Switching between dual displays is hard.

X11 has support for all of those, plus more. It's up to driver writers and server implementors to support those features properly.

The real question is when Windows and Macintosh will catch up to X11, because they are far behind.

Re:platform-independent?

[penguin-collective]

X11 clients and servers run on Linux, UNIX, Windows, OS X, and dozens of other operating systems.

but I like to suggest that either the people who are developing the X Window System work on this part of their software or drop the claim that they produce platform-independent software.

You don't understand. X11 is a protocol; there are dozens of different client implementations and dozens of different server implementations. X.org and XFree86 happen to be UNIX-centric, but other implementations are not.

Re:In other news

[BinLadenMyHero]

It's "X Window", not "Xwindows"

sorry

Uhmm, what are you talkin about?

[joto]

but X11 is moving more and more out of the main stream and into the non-user and highly geek distros only

So what are the main stream using these days? Fresco? Qt/Embedded? The Y Window System? rio?

and even there, I know many Debian users, for example, who are eager to switch to X.org.

Debian IS using xorg (only stable and maybe testing still uses Xfree86)

Since you are obviously confused, let me clarify. "X", "X11", and "The X Window System" all refers to the same thing. It is a specification for a way of displaying and interacting with graphics in windows on a computer and/or through a network.

X.org used to be the organization that coordinated that specification between various vendors of X11. It also maintained a "reference implementation" that nobody used. Then X11-innovation stagnated among the major unix vendors. X.org slowly died, and XFree86 (a "vendor", and a free implementation) became the defacto standard. Then XFree86 (the organization, not the implementation) did something stupid with their license, and the code was forked by mostly the same people that used to work on XFree86, and they decided to call themselves X.org (and their implementation xorg), since the name now was available).

Today, most everybody uses xorg, not XFree86. This is an update to xorg. To end-users it means zilch, apart from the fact that it's better for developers, and they can expect to see some innovation finally happen in the X11-world (well, in the long-term at least!)

Re:Uhmm, what are you talkin about?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not anytime soon. There would have to be a change important enough to break all earlier programs (including games from companies that don't exist anymore, e.g. Loki. I.e. not very likely, or the culprit will be crucified by a bunch of angry geeks who can't play their favorite games anymore).

It has only happened once, from X10 (no, not the cameras) to X11. The huge change that was important enought to break anything? COLORS. The X11 protocol however, is extensible enough that this shouldn't be necessary again.

Btw, the version numbers are misleading, they should actually be X1.0 and X1.1, but someone decided on X10 and X11.

Re:Uhmm, what are you talkin about?

[po8]

You're talking out of your ass. :-) OK, not really, but you and parent seem a bit confused.

In the beginning was the MIT X Consortium. They published the first standards documents for X, funded development of an X test suite to check implementations for standards compliance, and published a "sample" server that was supposed to be a sound implementation of the standards, as well as client-side libraries and utilities. Bob Scheiffler, Keith Packard, and Jim Fulton were the early developers here, with Scheiffler running the technical work and developing most of the architecture.

At some point, MIT and the X Consortium parted company. Some time later, the X Consortium became X/Open, and sometime later X.org.

During this evolution, the XFree86 folks forked the X code and documentation, and started their own development branch. Control of a few assets still remained with X/Open/X.org, and X.org continued to do X support and be used by some commercial vendors, but the X.org work was largely ignored by the PC community.

Recently, most of the X developers became disenchanted with the way XFree86 was being run, and forked X again under the aegis of freedesktop.org. For a variety of good reasons, the outcome of this was to reorganize X.org as a community-source-style foundation for X development. Current open source X work is done almost entirely under the aegis of X.org/freedesktop.org.

So, the standards are independent of the sample implementation, which is not really a reference implementation at all. To answer your other questions; the PC/Solaris only thing is just to push R7 out the door. The hope is to include all the other supported platforms in the "roll up" release due soon.

If I were building a non-PC X server right now, I'd use Kdrive instead of Xorg as a starting point unless I needed some of the advanced features of Xorg such as DRI support. Kdrive is shipped with current X.org distributions, including R6.9 and R7.

Hope this helps.

Re:What other improvements are we expecting to see

[Roguelazer]

• Transparent objects: XCOMPOSITE
• Anti-aliased fonts: XRENDER + Freetype (this has been used for a long time)
• Resolution Changes: XRANDR
• AJAX: Please remove the crack pipe from your mouth before speaking or posting
• Automatic scanning of video and monitors: X -configure
• X doesn't take up most of the memory, what lives in X does. IE: GNOME, KDE, etc.

more features!

[diegocgteleline.es]

This new x.org version is not just about autotooling the server

From http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/ChangesSince68

* New EXA acceleration architecture, with experimental support in sis(4), radeon(4), i128(4) (more to come)
* Individual extensions may be enabled or disabled on the command line using the -extension flag
* Improved chipset probing for IA64
* SecureRPC enabled on Linux by default
* Updated savage(4), including dualhead and DRI support
* Updated XRX support
* Fixes to rootless mode for Cygwin and Darwin ports
* Numerous K&R-to-ANSI C conversions
* Many Darwin fixes
* Updated XvMC support, enabling generic loading of hardware-specific drivers
* Added wsfb(4) video driver for OpenBSD and NetBSD framebuffer consoles
* Numerous ATI driver updates from the GATOS project, including TV input support
* More support for enhanced visuals like 12-bit PseudoColor and 30-bit TrueColor
* Improved ProPolice support
* Updates to nv(4) driver from XFree86 and nVIDIA
* via(4) updates from the Unichrome project, including DRI support
* i810(4) updates, including i915GM/E7721/i945G support and shadowfb support
* Improved module loader support for Alpha chips
* Added mingw port for native Win32 builds
* Updated PCI scanning
* Added DMA support to radeon(4) for Render and Xv operations
* Experimental DRI support for Radeon 9500 and above
* Updated xterm to #204 from [WWW]upstream
* Added evdev(4) input driver for generic input handling on Linux
* Switched to libdl-based module loader
* Improved acceleration for sunffb(4)
* MMX blending routines for the Render extension
* sis(4) updates
* New sisusb(4) driver for USB-attached video
* Tiled framebuffer support for radeon(4)
* Initial support for running the Xorg server without root privileges
* Improved acceleration for newport(4)
* Add DragonFly BSD support
* Update bundled Freetype to 2.1.9
* r128(4) dualhead support
* mach64(4) TV-OUT support
* ATI Theater 200 video decoder support
* SGI Altix support
* Disabled antique [WWW]DPS extension
* Support for FreeBSD/powerpc
* Enhanced software Render core
* Support for more than 12 buttons in the generic mouse(4) driver
* Better support for DRI on 64-bit platforms
* Solaris support updates: enhanced mouse driver, agpgart support, experimental AMD64 support, kbd(4) support, /dev/audio keyboard bell option
* Output-only windows
* Non-rectangular mergedfb desktops
* Update bundled fontconfig to 2.3.2

Re:Great...

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

If it ever finishes, you can try compiling OpenOffice.org. Should keep your space heater running for several decades, at least..

Re:In other news

[Bruce Perens]

That is, if anyone but David is working on XFree86. And yes, David did put his foot in it in a real big way.

Re:Fully Modular

[cortana]

This has been true for years! Please stop spreading FUD.

Re:What other improvements are we expecting to see

[aconkling]

I used to X with a passion when I first started using linux back in 98.
Oh, man, those were the days... when you could not only X but X with a passion. [sighs wistfully]

X is not bad but perhaps Xorg sucks?
Nope. Next question.

What I want to know is if they are planning on [...] adding features like sound support,
Sound support is handled by a sound server, which fortunately runs independently of X.

transparent objects,
You mean like compositing?

anti-aligned fonts (I think support is added now),
Keep your magnet away from my monitor!

resolution changes that dont require a reboot,
Resolution changes don't require a reboot, just a restart of X.

ajax/caml/dashboard or some xml and javascript support ,
Huh?! AJAX is for the Web, CAML is a proprietary language, so of course X.org isn't written therein, and I'm not sure in what way you mean "support for XML or Javascript" other than to say that extensions/plugins/modules (whatever the X people call them) would be significantly slower if written in these languages. Since it seems that you're "concerned" with X's bloat, I'm sure you understand why that'd be a bad idea.

I actually hope this was helpful, but if I was just the unwitting victim of flamebait, I can roll with it.

Re:Fully Modular

[cortana]

Well I can't sepeak for apparantly moronised distributions such as the ones you have used, but on Debian, X clients depend on libX11. This is entirely separate from the X server (xserver-xfree86).

Re:In other news

[Scott Byer]

Actually, it's not a System named X Windows, but a Window System named X.

So it's either the "X Window System", or for short, X.

Re:Keep in mind, ....

[CRCulver]

I guess you forgot that XFree has an unacceptable license that means few Linux distro maintainers could include it.

Re:Fully Modular

[Anonymous Coward]

Macs do not use X11. Apple distributes an X server you can use for X applications, but native OS X applications do not use this.

Resolution changes

[po8]

Grandparent: "resolution changes that dont require a reboot"

Parent: "Resolution changes don't require a reboot, just a restart of X"

Actually, for some time now resolution changes have been possible on the fly using the xrandr utility and associated X extension. On some platforms, xrandr also permits rotating and reflecting the screen on the fly also.

Re:What other improvements are we expecting to see

[ookaze]

Resolution changes don't require a reboot, just a restart of X.

Actually they don't require a restart of X either. The only thing that require a restart of X is a depth change (though I'm not even sure that it actually requires restart of X), like from 32 bpp to 16 bpp.
It was never a problem to me, and I think very few people will need to switch to less than 32 bpp (or rather 24 bpp).