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XFree86 3.3.5 released
DirkHohndel writes "The XFree86 Project has released XFree86-3.3.5.
The
release notes should be a good first place
to start. It might take the mirrors a while to get updated,
distribution specific packages for SuSE, Red Hat and Debian should be available at their web sites, soon.
Dirk " Dirk was also kind enough to include a short list of importat features which can be viewed below.
- Support for S3 Savage4 and Savage3D. Limited to Linux/x86 at this point.
- Support for S3 Trio3D/2X.
- Support for DGux.
- Support for QNX.
- Fix bug in Mach64 server on Rage LT and Rage LT Pro.
- Fix SiS driver for 530 and 620.
- Fix the spurious underline problem on NVidia Riva TNT cards.
- Fix the PS/2 mouse problem with later Linux kernels.
- Misc updates and bugfixes in Rendition driver.
- Updates from SuSE and Red Hat, including more keyboards, PAM support, ARM and AXP fixes, security fixes.
3.3.4 was out the same time as the first pre 4.0 snapshot (3.9.15 more correctly. Now there is a 3.9.16 for the bold and experimental) 3.3.5 was suppose to be out in a couple of weeks. Now a month and ten days (who's counting) later .5 shows it face. Wheeeeeeee!
Does anyone know if TNT*2* is supported by XFree86? Tx.
Offtopic, but let me add another voice here. And let's not forget the XFree team either!
Thanks!
If the fonts in your Netscape are screwy, that must be a personal problem. Install one of the available TrueType font servers (Or wait for 4.0 which will, barring patent lawsuits, incorporate TrueType support) and some decent TrueType fonts and you'll immediately notice a HUGE increase in your X font quality.
The release notes say the upgrade is strongly reccomended, but not why. It seems strange to reccomend something strongly and not explain why. My card (Matrox G200) works fine so I'm hesitant to change, but it makes me wonder if there is indeed a good reason to upgrade. I guess I'll never know :)
I had problems runing SVGAlib progs when gpm was running when I started the program from X.
Well a standard problem with using a PS/2 mouse with xwindows is when you switch from xwindows, to the console and back.. when xwin grabs the mouse its a little buggy... So it ends up sending button press events and whatnot if you move the mouse a little while switching (I cant help it!! hehe) this is a documented bug with PS/2 + xwin, and Ive seen it on both my lil compaq notebook, my desktop system and any system IVe used ps2 mice on. This might or might not be what they fixed. Also, someone is redoing the keyboard/mice handling code in the kernel from scratch and apparently also fixed the problem on that end. But that code wont be merged with the main kernel for a while.
Is that in there? -bobby
Dude? I have a matrox g200, 8mb ram, and it doesn't work that well under x. I mean, I get 1280x1024@24bit, but the scrolling and moving windows sucks ass man! TNT(16mb) is pretty good, and the TNT2 kicks even more ass! I'm trying to sell my video card system (8mb g200, two Voodoo2's 12 meg each, SLI'ed for 24 megs).. to get a TNT2 (or should I wait for the GeFORCE?)
Personally, I find anti-aliasing of large fonts _extremely_ useful, especially when doing graphic design work.
I suspect your point is really that Windows doesn't anti-alias small fonts. If so, that's not an OS limitation, it's up to the app to decide whether it wants a particular sized font to be anti-aliased.
As to anti-aliased fonts being a tick-box feature -- well, I for one wouldn't want to be without them (even on my 1600x1200 display).
--
djn@araxis.com
The cursor shows up if you tell emacs to use a bold font.
That's the exact same problem that happens to me... of course, it started happening when i moved into my dorm, which is when i started using almost solely linux, and dropped my mouse rather badly on the way in. so maybe it is one of them silly hardware problems... =]
AA Truetype fonts are nice to have for daily English use, but are absolutely essential for more complex writing systems like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Bitmapped or non-AA Chinese fonts are butt ugly and give me major eyestrain =(...
word on the street is that it's a problem with the nvidia driver, but emacs 20.4 has a change in the cursor display code that bypasses the problem.
I can get 1600x1280 working on my ASUS V3800, but when I run OpenGL stuff the screen splits diagonally between the top-left and bottom-right corners, and flickers between grey and black... Anyone else have this problem ??
A trick to fix this problem is to switch to a VC or two and back to X. -b
my understanding is that windows does anti-alias small fonts, so that even 7pt text remains readable. the TrueType font smoothing can be defined in individual fonts, like kearning, so that different amounts (or none at all) of smoothing will be used depending on the size of the font being displayed.
there's an enhanced font properties download somewhere on microsoft.com which displays the specific nitty-gritty truetype details of individual fonts..
as for the uselessness of anti-aliasing large-text.. that's simply ignorant. until computer displays approach resolustions ~300dpi anti-aliasing is highly necessary.
I downloaded a copy of AccelX, from www.xig.com and its at least twice as fast as XFree86. It starts up quicker, mpegs play with hardly any skips. Fonts are readable in the netscape location bar. XFree86 is a piece of shit compared with this. I only have a 4 meg S3 Virge card also.
It costs $100 (US) not open source is highly commercialized through marketing and demeans other competition in this case xfree86. No thank you, I'll wait.
Has anyone gotten Sync on Green working on
:(
a Matrox G200?
I have a RedHat 6.0 system on an AMD K6-2,
and I was counting on having the Matrox
output Sync on Green. When I set the
Sync on Green option I get Combined Sync
I've tried 3.3.3.4 to no avail...
Any suggestions welcome
Michiel Toneman
toneman@phil.uu.nl
The latest skinny is the same as the old skinny. The X Window System, and applications that use it, assume that a rendered font will be in monochrome (one bit per pixel). Anti-aliasing requires multiple bits per pixel. Implementing anti-aliased fonts at the X Windows level is unmanagably difficult.
There are widget libraries that do their own text rendering with anti-aliasing, and Berlin does anti-aliasing for fonts. I don't see X11 ever supporting it directly.
----
----
Open mind, insert foot.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
It makes fonts look scary-ugly crappy.
Turn it off and things look an order of
magnitude better.
I'd have to disagree with that assessment. I've found anti-alised fonts to be extremely useful, especially when you want to incorporate fonts into graphic design work. 9 point Verdana on my 800x600 monitor looks fine when anti-aliased =)
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Does anyone know if the new keyboard support includes the Logitech Internet Keyboard?
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
If this sort of thing happens, you may benefit from the Magic SysRq kernel feature. Read about it at /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sysrq.txt
Quoth the text file:
* Okay, so what can I use them for?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Well, un'R'aw is very handy when your X server or a svgalib program crashes.
And, there's lots more listed where came from. :)
When I used a PS/2 mouse, every now and then when I switched from X to the console and back, the console would freeze and I would only be able to get back in via telnet. I've got my fingers crossed hoping that's the bug they fixed :-)
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Damn, and I thought I knew a lot about Linux... I always wondered what that kernel option did. :-)
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Here, here!
The work that those guys do is very, very appreciated.
Thank you. And I mean that, dammit.
Well, if you want anti-aliased fonts under X, you can use something like GNOME's Canvas to draw using anti-aliasing.
It's worth pointing out that they way MS has anti-aliased fonts in Windows is totally wrong. What's the point of anti-aliasing a 72-point font? It's small fonts that have the most to gain from anti-aliasing. For an example, look at how Acorn's RISC OS implemented anti-aliased fonts: they applied it to small ones, making it perfectly possible to edit 10-point Times on a 640x256 screen.
Furthermore, I don't believe that anti-aliasing is much use, except for intricate fonts such as Zapf Chancery. I use Verdana and xfsft for pretty much everything. Verdana is wonderfully readable down to about 9 points on my 1152x896 display, mainly because of the hinting logic that is in most Truetype fonts, as opposed to Type1 fonts, which have to rely on the generic hinting logic in the rasteriser.
Anti-aliased fonts are more of a "tick-box" feature than a real advance.
Paul.
On a completely different note, my G400 works just fine with the XSVGA server from 3.3.4, but hangs completely when using the VGA16 server (e.g., when trying to use XF86Setup). Still, I managed to hand tweak the config file (reminds me of the good old days!), and it works just fine now -- 1600x1200 at 32bpp :-)
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Debian X Strike Force
What's the latest skinny on anti-aliased screen fonts under X?
thx,
kent
**>>BELCH
Check it out first though.
LINUX stands for: Linux Inux Nux Ux X
FRA: STFU GTFO
The X group, despite having one of the most complex support tasks of any debian maintainer, is also consistently one of the fastest to respond when upstream upgrades. More power to them... (and, of course, more power to the upstream guys who provide stuff to keep the Debian maintainers busy...)
-luge
IAAL,BIANLY
The release notes say that this fixes a spurious underline problem with the TNT cards. Has anyone tried it out yet? Does it fix the emacs problem where you can't see the cursor?
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
Since MS's TrueType fonts aren't free, does anyone know where I can get free/gpl versions of the common TrueType fonts (arial, times new roman, etc)?
If you mean free as in beer, then you ought to check out http://www.microsoft.com/t ypography/fontpack/default.htm. You can use infozip on the self-extracting archives. Work quite nicely with xfstt.
Berlin-- http://www.berlin-consortium.org
DNA just wants to be free...
I have a problem where the cursor occasionally gets 'stuck' in the upper right hand corner of the screen and I have to kill X to get it back. This started happening right after the PS/2 code was merged with the keyboard driver.
:)
I HOPE this is what they fixed...
jf
I'll second that question.
I've got a Thinkpad i1450 (an AWESOME Linux machine by the way. 11th commandment: Thou shalt lust after no other laptop other than a Thinkpad - heh heh.
Anyway, the Track Point stopped working for me, even when I don't run X (plain old gpm). Under Windows it works perfectly. I've been using Linux with an external mouse. That's OK, but I prefer the Track Point.
Is this the bug that this version of X fixes? I sure hope so. I was going to send my laptop in to have the hardware checked.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I have a problem with the built-in PS/2 mouse / touchpad of my laptop as well, with all the 2.2.x and 2.3.x kernels. The mouse just plain doesn't work: the kernel refuses to detect it.
:-)
However, there's a workaround for that by modifying a line in your kernel source code to fake the detection of the mouse; if you don't feel like editing the kernel code and recompiling it you have to fall back on the 2.0.x kernel for now.
I have seen other mouse problems like the ones mentioned here, but not anymore since I started using gpm for the mouse, and set up X to use the gpmdata device instead of the straight mouse device. Since gpm manages all my mouse stuff now in both console and X, there's no problems and no conflicts, and gpm is better at getting my 3 button mouse to actually be 3 button
Anyway, the patch to the 2.2 kernel to get your PS/2 mouse working if it doesn't work at all, is:
--- drivers/char/pc_keyb.c~ Tue Aug 10 22:17:55 1999
+++ drivers/char/pc_keyb.c Wed Aug 18 21:52:22 1999
@@ -966,7 +966,7 @@
static int __init psaux_init(void)
{
- if (!detect_auxiliary_port())
+ if (1 || !detect_auxiliary_port())
return -EIO;
misc_register(&psaux_mouse);
This should work against all 2.2 kernels.
--Tim
Colored as well. That plenty sucks. Is it a TNT server problem? Bad bug: should be fixed..
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
..still do not show over white space.. ;(
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
.. it breaks in all different modes, when it uses mode-default faces.
If 3.3.5 does not fix it, I am trading in my TNT...
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
all i gotta say is about F'N TIME!
now i can convert my network over..
' god damn this is one wacky game show ' ~ jay in mallrats
The correct url is http://www.0wned.org/~cain/ragefury.htm thats a zero ( 0 ) not an oh ( o )
Your Momma's so fat she makes emacs look like nano!
When I switch from X to console and back I get mouse trouble in X. The first mouse movement after this typically makes it jump to a corner and execute some randome keypresses while doing this. Then it becomes normal until the next console switch.
Not so fun when it ends up pasting 60 lines into a root xterm. Trouble is avoidable by pressing a mouse butten 3-4 times before attempting any movement.
Wasn't this out at the same time as the Pre 4.0 snapshot? It was on the XFree86 web page when I first saw the 3.9.16 story ...
its about time for me to upgrade, I think. I've been running whichever version of XF comes with RedHat 5.2. Hasn't given me any problems. But maybe now is the time. I never had a problem with my PS/2 mouse but I don't want to, either.
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
jdube is who
Can someone please clue me in about the "PS/2 mouse problem in later Linux kernels" that is fixed in this release?
"Half of this game is 90% mental."
apt still gives 3.3.4 as someone else said. .deb rather than compile from source.
Are we expecting it in a day or so? If so, I'll
wait for the
Work computer has a Trio 3D card that's practically
worthless 'til I get this installed
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
I just downloaded intlfonts-1.2, and it includes some nice free ttf fonts in the distro. Go search filewatcher for it. I've always said that the one thing that Micros~1 did well was fonts (must be their Mac group...), but their font license sucks rocks. Good thing we have free alternatives.
actually that would be a good free project to package and enhance 100% free ttf fonts that are hinted better than the Micros~1 fonts. Someone @ xfree86 is probably already on it...
Next dependency on Micros~1 that we can eliminate...?
Lets go 4.0!!!
The beta server sucks for playing Q3
There are FAQs because people don't read. If they read anything at all there would be no need for FAQs. FAQs are just more documentation which people cheerfully ignore. I think it's a prefectly airtight system. Imagine the confusion there would be if tomorrow everyone instead of just being stupid actually became informed! I'd sure confuse the heck out of me if suddenly people began sounding like they actually knew what was really going on. What a nightmare.
I'm having the same problem. I've set up RH 6.0 on about 6 machines with V770 TNT2 cards in the last month and have had the same problem on each of them. I've tried all kinds of things to no avail.
I'm also having problems with XEmacs. The buttons don't have the correct graphics (they are black and white) and most of them (along with some of the menu functions) don't work. Missing library perhaps?
I'm getting tired of pico.
Looks like they're just trying to fill the time until 4 comes out so the masses don't get too adjitated.
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