XFree86 News

PseudoMan was the first with the news: XFree86 3.3.4 has finally been released (yes, you can actually see the contents of the directory now). Rumour has it that the new release contains support for various Matrox cards, and may be the last release before we see 3.9 show up. Update: 07/20 06:05 by J : It seems that the first public beta of 4.0, 3.9.15, is now available. xinerama, here I come!

Comments

Re:XFree86 could be a little more open

[Brandon S. Allbery]

> XFree could start by opening up its codebase a little.

Once upon a time, it was open. Then certain Linux distribution maintainers (no longer around) decided it'd be neat to include outdated, buggy pre-alpha X releases in their distributions --- and redirected all the bug reports to the XFree folks. They Were Not Happy, and I don't blame them.

The upshot here is that *we* screwed up, and the XFree folks got burned badly as a result. If we want to see more open XFree86 development, we're going to have to prove to them that we're not going to pull stunts like that any more.

(Unfortunately, with Red Hat's fondness for including prerelease stuff in their distributions --- "prepatch" kernels and Perl "m" releases, to name some from the 5.x era --- I'm not sure I'd trust them to keep their mitts off prerelease XFree86 code.)

Why is font handling so bad?

[Matts]

I really don't get it. Font handling is a well understood technology, and yet XFree still falls short. Fonts (even true-type fonts) look terrible under XFree - they look _far_ superior under (for example) Solaris' X server. And I'm afraid to say it, fonts just look a lot better under MacOS or Windows. It's a real shame, because I think XFree would be a lot more usable with a decent font engine underneath - and yes, I've tried both TrueType font engines for XFree.

Anyone know of any progress being made in this area?

Also font setup is appalling. I can't believe you have to edit font.dir files for each directory - why on earth wouldn't the server do this for you? I was astonished at the amount of work it took to get a few TrueType fonts working before the perl TrueType tools came out to do some of the work for you.

I guess you could consider this a bug report. :)

Matt.

perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-: ,hacker Perl another Just)'

Re:Why is font handling so bad?

[John Fulmer]

There are actually two issues here...

1) The Type1 font engine was donated by IBM many many moons ago. It works, and sometimes well, if you have a good font, but has never been optimized.

2) Many of the standard XFree fonts were donated and they weren't really high quality.

Personally, I find that TrueType fonts look very nice in X (with RedHat 6.0's xfs (freetype) or xfstt). I've compared them with the local NT box with a 'real' TT font renderer, and they are at least as good.

One thing to remmeber is that Netscape is broken as regards scaleable fonts. That's why some pages look really odd with tiny fonts. However, if you do a trick (deals with typing in the font size in preferences), my Netscape fonts look as good as NT's on all pages.

jf

XFree86 needs more developers.

[cbarry]

It's kinda sad how short the XFree team is on developers when more or less 99.999% of Linux users use X and 100% of distributions package it. It could really use some more commercial support from RedHat and SUSE, though they have helped a little bit in the past (RHat donated NeoMagic code once...).

For information on becoming an XFree86 developer, please visit the XFree86 developer page.

Also, you non-programmers that use X can do your part by knowing that RedHat and other commercial Linux vendors have ears for their customers and showing concern for the frequency of XFree86 release cycles is a good way to let them know that support for X development is very important to the success of Linux.

Re:XFree86 could be a little more open

[DirkHohndel]

The support load is one of the key problems behind the current
somewhat closed approach. There are other issues (the devel
sources often contain drivers that were written under NDA
and for which we haven't received permission to release,
yet. Those obviously can't be publicly available).

The 3.9.15 release is somewhat a test case. If we receive
tons of support email from people trying to use it and
asking for help, then we might revert back to the closed
cycle that we did before. I certainly hope that none
of the distributions will attempt to include 3.9.15.
It is definitely not ready for that. SuSE will NOT include
it on their next distribution, btw...

Don't get me wrong. Bug reports (and of course, patches)
are extremely welcome. I saw another comment that we didn't
respond to bug reports. My answer to that is simple.
We get so many reports, and there are only so few people
to respond. Usually none of them go unseen and as long
as they contain a fix or the fix is obvious, things
usually get fixed as well.

Of course, the 800 or so bug reports "my Trio3D card
doesn't work" didn't really help to fix the problem...

Dirk

Re:XFree86 could be a little more open

[DirkHohndel]

Sorry if things went wrong that time. I get tons
of emails a day, so I must admit that I don't
remember the incident that you are commenting on.

There is no competition whatsoever between the
work that PI does and the work that SuSE does
for 3D. I am sure that Frank LaMonica from PI
will be happy to comment on his take on the issue.

Most likely your request came before the
DRI stuff was released to XFree86 (at which point
I usually deflected people since the stuff they
were looking for simply wasn't there, yet).

Normally everyone who sends email to XFree86@XFree86.Org
and states "I would like to work on ABC" with "ABC"
somewhat more informative than "XFree86" or "drivers"
will get an application form within a few days.
And those people are always added to the devel
team.

As to the generic issue here, yes, I think that
XFree86 should open up its development a bit.
And guess what, we will. The release of the
3.9.x snapshots is a first step in that direction,
more will follow.

Dirk Hohndel