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Slackware Chooses X.org Server Over XFree86 523

Posted by timothy from the is-it-so-xurprising dept.
Ananamous Coward writes "Some big distros had already dumped XFree86 for X.org for license reasons, but now Slackware, one of the most classical and stable ones, has announced in its changelog for slackware-current that they are switching to X.org, mostly for compatibility reasons. Looks like X.org is now the future of X for Linux ..."
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Slackware Chooses X.org Server Over XFree86 More

Slackware Chooses X.org Server Over XFree86

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  • Wait... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 31, 2004 @07:35PM (#9299748)
    There are people running Slackware that use a GUI?

    • Re:Wait... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DaLiNKz ( 557579 ) * on Monday May 31, 2004 @07:37PM (#9299765) Homepage Journal
      never know, they could just be running X with a big terminal open.. no GUI :) Honestly the only things I ever use X for is web/multiple terminals on one screen.. everything else is usually text based.. I'm far faster with commands then I am with GUI's.

      • Re:Wait... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by undertow3886 ( 605537 ) <[ofni.asma] [ta] [ffoeg]> on Monday May 31, 2004 @07:46PM (#9299832)
        Have you ever tried screen [gnu.org]?

        • Re:Wait... (Score:5, Informative)

          by NNKK ( 218503 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @08:37PM (#9300109) Homepage
          I love Screen, and frequently use it, but mostly for keeping interactive processes (e.g. IRC clients) running on remote systems.

          Unfortunately, even for people that operate primarily in text, Screen is not a perfect replacement for X (or another GUI). Perhaps the biggest issue is that it lacks facilities for having multiple terminals visible at the same time, which is a requirement for many people (including myself).

          Framebuffer support in Linux also isn't particularly great yet. Even on cards with decent framebuffer support in Linux, it's as yet often painfully slow. Even on upper-end systems it's noticable, and on low-mid and lower systems, I'd imagine it would be nearly unusuable.

          And in the end, even command-line junkies often use graphical browsers.

          • Re:Wait... (Score:5, Interesting)

            by p2sam ( 139950 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @08:59PM (#9300193)
            gnu screen has a "split" screen feature, which allows you to split the screen horizontal subsections, thus allowing you to see multiple screens at the same time. it's not perfect, but it's sufficient for my purposes.

          • Re:Wait... (Score:5, Informative)

            by Xofer D ( 29055 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @09:01PM (#9300200) Homepage Journal
            Sure it has window support! From screen(1):
            C-a S (split) Split the current region into two new ones.
            This results in this display, but probably bigger:
            ptyp4 ttyACM2 xdb7
            ptyp5 ttyACM3 xdb8
            ptyp6 ttyACM4 zero
            /dev$
            /dev$
            --0 bash--
            23001 333 cmdline uptime
            23002 3797 config.gz version
            23003 4 cpuinfo vmstat
            23004 444 crypto
            23229 447 devices
            /proc$
            --1 bash--

          • Re:Wait... (Score:3, Informative)

            by deadlinegrunt ( 520160 )
            "...Perhaps the biggest issue is that it lacks facilities for having multiple terminals visible at the same time, which is a requirement for many people (including myself)."

            Umm, man screen next time.
            Here's a hint: C-a S
            Here's another just because I feel benevolent at the moment: C-a ?

            BTW, Slack "just works"

          • Re:Wait... (Score:5, Informative)

            by MacJedi ( 173 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @09:02PM (#9300205) Homepage
            Unfortunately, even for people that operate primarily in text, Screen is not a perfect replacement for X (or another GUI). Perhaps the biggest issue is that it lacks facilities for having multiple terminals visible at the same time, which is a requirement for many people (including myself).
            That's not completely true. Check out screen regions [ohio-state.edu].

        • Re:Wait... (Score:5, Informative)

          by Oshuma.Shiroki ( 232199 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @10:06PM (#9300521) Homepage Journal
          Or twin [linuz.sns.it]? Console window manager. Gotta love it. Even has an XMMS applet. ;)

      • Maybe you're different, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by garyebickford ( 222422 ) <gar37bicNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday June 01, 2004 @01:31AM (#9301223)

        Back in the day, Apple did a series of time/motion studies regarding mousng vs. command keys and command lines. They showed that (for the tasks they studied, of course) in IIRC all casees, the GUI was faster, however the command line users thought they were faster. The explanation de jure was that because your mind is more involved in typing, it seems like less time even though it's more.

        Naturally, it depends on what you're doing. I once watched a saleswoman with exactly 1 month's training on computers use the NeXT Interface Builder to build a complete calculator application with working buttons in about 15 minutes, including generating the necessary C functions. All that had to be done to complete the project was to put stuff like "return (B*A);" into the function for multiply, etc. OTOH, using a GUI to compose the algorithm for a complex physics function would probably be counterproductive.

        This was back in the early-mid 1980's so I really don't recall the details.

        • Re:Maybe you're different, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by jarran ( 91204 ) on Tuesday June 01, 2004 @04:14AM (#9301686)
          Back in the day, Apple did a series of time/motion studies regarding mousng vs. command keys and command lines. They showed that (for the tasks they studied, of course) in IIRC all casees, the GUI was faster,

          Yeah, of course they did. They were selling computers with GUI, in competition with computers command lines.

          Isn't it remarkable that research by Microsoft shows Linux is more expernsive that Windows, research from Apple shows that GUIs are faster, and research from ExxonMobil shows that buring fossil fuels doesn't cause global warming?

          • Re:Maybe you're different, but... (Score:4, Interesting)

            by Paladin128 ( 203968 ) <aaron@noSpam.traas.org> on Tuesday June 01, 2004 @07:26AM (#9302211) Homepage
            If I recall correctly, Xerox did the same kind of study in the late 70's/early 80's. They made an experimental fully-graphical interface and word processor. They tested experienced users using both emacs and the graphical word processor, and the GUI always won.

            I could be slightly incorrect with the details here, particularly with the dates. My HCI professor at college told me she was part of the test when she worked at Xerox PARC.

    • Re:Wait... (Score:5, Funny)

      by paulthomas ( 685756 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @07:54PM (#9299891) Journal
      Yeah. It's called ncurses.

    • Well... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by SaDan ( 81097 )
      I run X with fluxbox on my laptop, but the rest of my machines at home don't even have monitors or keyboards. ;-)

      At any rate, can't be surprised with this decision. Power to the people, down with crappy licenses.

      • Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)

        by dipipanone ( 570849 ) on Tuesday June 01, 2004 @04:57AM (#9301790)
        but the rest of my machines at home don't even have monitors or keyboards. ;-)

        You should count yourself lucky. I'm so poor that none of my machines have CPU's, hard drives or RAM.

        In fact, I had to reply to this post using a punched card, which was then delivered by courier to the university to be run on their 1950's time sharing system...

    • Re:Wait... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Arker ( 91948 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @07:58PM (#9299920) Homepage
      Of course there are. One of the many strengths of the distribution has long been that it has great X packages. Always fast and stable, and they don't try to shove 'desktops' down your throat with it. Want GNOME? Fine, there's a great package. But if you'd rather run twm or WindowMaker or something and skip that crap, you can. Of course you can with other distros too, but sometimes it can be a lot of work. Not so with slack.

      And the packages really are top quality - I remember back when all the major distros were shipping KDE libraries with debugging info compiled in, which made it take like 10 times the memory it should have - but slack had it right. As always.

      I really don't know why folk think it's somehow a difficult or 'unfriendly' distro. Friendliest I've ever seen, and I've tried most of them.

      • Re:Wait... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by irokitt ( 663593 ) <archimandrites-iaur.yahoo@com> on Monday May 31, 2004 @08:08PM (#9299970)
        Believe it or not, two of the friendliest installations IMHO are Slack and Gentoo. Slack is extremely simple, and Gentoo has, hands down, the best dicumentation and forum help of any other distro. As for graphical environments, Slackware uses an lncurses based installer;)

        • Re:Wait... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Kyouryuu ( 685884 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @09:08PM (#9300232) Homepage
          I think it depends a lot on your definition of "friendly." Gentoo has a definite forum, user community, and very extensive documentation. In this respect, it is "friendly." Yet, despite that, I wouldn't expect Joe Average to be able to get through that documentation and actually set the whole thing up. But then you have the Fedoras and the Mandrakes that configure everything for you and have happy little UIs that let you tinker with everything else. In that sense, these distros are also friendly, imho.

          • Re:Wait... (Score:5, Insightful)

            by EvilTwinSkippy ( 112490 ) <yoda@nOSpAM.etoyoc.com> on Monday May 31, 2004 @09:42PM (#9300371) Homepage Journal
            "Friendly" for me has less to do with a sugar coated install than it does being able to handle wierd installation issues. 2 summers ago I had a pair of 486 laptops I wanted to install a minimal system on to use them as X terminals.

            Micro distros don't have X, and do you know how hard it is to get a modern distro to fit in 20 MB of ram? I finally had to scrounge around for an old copy of RedHat, and then hack the install media to trick it into supporting my modern network card. Ugly.

            The Gentoo "installer" is really just a boot prompt. The instructions are pretty straightforward and the steps very thoroughly explained. I just wish I had known about it back when I was building those laptops. (And no, I wouldn't have tried to compile software on those boxes. I'd build the system in a chrooted environment on my destop and then tarball the sucker.)

      • Re:Wait... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by rehabdoll ( 221029 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @08:15PM (#9300005) Homepage
        could not agree more. slackware is the most logical gnu/linux distribution i've ever used. simple and easy. sure, redhat/fedora might run (almost) out of the box, but if you want to change something, its harder than with slack.

        or maybe its just me..

        • Re:Wait... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by ThisIsFred ( 705426 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @10:13PM (#9300552) Journal
          There's something to be said for having a clean layout to begin with, and not changing it - because it works. Slackware's installer has pretty much been the same since I chose it as my distro about 9 years ago. The expert mode got one little tweak which I love: You pick all the packages beforehand, then the installer goes through each set and installs them without further input.

    • Re:Wait... (Score:3, Funny)

      by datadriven ( 699893 )
      Finally an article when I can talk about Slackware and NOT be a troll. Actually if you look on linuxquestions.org you'll see that there are a LOT of slackware users that use a gui.

    • Re:Wait... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Saeger ( 456549 ) <farrellj@nOSPam.gmail.com> on Monday May 31, 2004 @08:18PM (#9300019) Homepage
      There are people running Slackware that use a GUI?

      Yeah, and those rehabilitated console-snobs are now able to perform l33t magic like viewing & editing images, watching movies, and playing games besides nethack!

      Step 1 of the 12 step program is disassociating exclusive CLI-mastery from self-worth. :)

      --

  • only makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)

    by weekendwarrior1980 ( 768311 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @07:38PM (#9299767) Homepage
    Internal Politics triumphed over project development in the XFree86. The future of open source X windows system lies is xorg branch, plus they'll be integrating pretty exciting stuff from Keith P's exciting new FD.o project which will be able to give longhorn run for it's money. I am really looking forward to the kdrive stuff. So Xfree has grown out of it's usefulness and like any rudiments in evolutionary process, it must wither away.

    • Re:only makes sense (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Rick Zeman ( 15628 )
      So Xfree has grown out of it's usefulness and like any rudiments in evolutionary process, it must wither away.

      But what if it doesn't hand there's a horrible schism between the two and disto x supports one and distro y supports the other? That's gonna get ugly.

      • Re:only makes sense (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 31, 2004 @07:54PM (#9299886)
        1. But what if it doesn't hand there's a horrible schism between the two and disto x supports one and distro y supports the other? That's gonna get ugly.

        It won't. The X.org fork came about because of the issues with XFree management. Over the last year, the folks at X.org have gained momentum and are now seen as the main fork...not XFree.

        If XFree didn't drive so many developers to create the X.org fork, there wouldn't be a transition.

        In short, X.org is routing around the dammage.

      • Re:only makes sense (Score:5, Informative)

        by weekendwarrior1980 ( 768311 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @07:57PM (#9299910) Homepage
        Actually if you see at XFree's website, the only major player, if you want to call it that, that supports xfree is NetBSD, the rest are mostly hobby distros or foreign based. Sooner or later, they will follow the major distro's lead.

        • Re:only makes sense (Score:5, Informative)

          by Paul d'Aoust ( 679461 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @10:27PM (#9300608)
          maybe this is only a small point of contention, but Gentoo technically hasn't taken the plunge yet either. X.org (6.7.0) is in the package tree, and many Gentoo users are already using X.org, but it is marked unstable for all architectures. Gentoo is obviously making strong efforts to make the change, but they haven't totally changed over -- not just yet.

          • Re:only makes sense (Score:5, Informative)

            by Mawen ( 317927 ) on Tuesday June 01, 2004 @01:09AM (#9301143) Journal
            I'd say Gentoo has half-taken the plunge. I just did a new install a few days ago and virtual-x11 or whatever points to x.org, not xfree. Of course, with X.org masked (~x86), this means the default X11 is masked, which is weird and should probably be fixed one way or the other.

    • Re:only makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)

      by paroneayea ( 642895 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @08:41PM (#9300123) Homepage
      So Xfree has grown out of it's usefulness and like any rudiments in evolutionary process, it must wither away.
      And this, my friends, is what RMS meant when he coined the term Free (libre) Software. The freedom to move the software in different directions when the project leaders decide to make bad decisions. The freedom to fix things when things aren't going right.
      I do not think I am being radical when I say this is what is happening here.

      • Hear! Hear! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Per Abrahamsen ( 1397 ) on Tuesday June 01, 2004 @01:45AM (#9301283) Homepage
        This kind of stuff happens all the time with proprietary software. Sudenly, the company has a new "vision", and you no longer seem to be part of it. But with proprietary software you are screwed. You can try to keep using the software, even though either the license, pricing structure or direction of development is no longer a good match for your need. Or you can change to an entirely different product, which can be very expensive in retraining.

  • I wonder what Richard Dawes thinks... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by darthcamaro ( 735685 ) * on Monday May 31, 2004 @07:39PM (#9299782)
    One of the things the XFree86 tyrant touted was that Slackware still used his 'stuff' - i wonder what he'll do now.
    If you look at the current page [xfree86.org] of distros using XFree86 you'll be hard pressed to find one that is in common usage - pretty sad considering that until the moron decided to mess around with license it was the defacto standard on every Linux distribution
    Goes to show you...don't mess around with licenses....Freedom is Freedom and that's what FOSS is all about.

    • Re:I wonder what Richard Dawes thinks... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Eluding Reality ( 691589 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @07:43PM (#9299811)
      To make things even worse - 4 of the distros still listed are "slackware based"
      Guess his list will be getting a bit smaller again when these ones update their base systems....

    • Re:I wonder what Richard Dawes thinks... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Daimaou ( 97573 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @07:51PM (#9299873)
      Richard Dawes probably doesn't care. I think David Dawes should be getting a clue though.

    • Re:I wonder what Richard Dawes thinks... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Daimaou ( 97573 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @07:57PM (#9299908)
      I think the license is just the last straw. By itself, the license may not been that big a deal, but the XFree86 leadership has been doing a lot to piss off developers, avoid enhancements, and turn XFree86 into a stagnant project for quite a while now.

      • Re:I wonder what Richard Dawes thinks... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Chuck Chunder ( 21021 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @08:31PM (#9300073) Journal
        I think you are right. On top of pissing off X developers I think the licence change reached out to other sections of the community. We may not ever have to work with XFree code but we do understand that licencing is important and that someone deciding to change a licence more or less unilaterally is something that makes people nervous.

        As such it created a bit of a popular movement (and also corporate support) behind some of the developers who previously had struggled with the situation more or less on their own.

      • Re:I wonder what Richard Dawes thinks... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by 10Ghz ( 453478 ) on Tuesday June 01, 2004 @01:55AM (#9301312)
        the XFree86 leadership has been doing a lot to piss off developers, avoid enhancements, and turn XFree86 into a stagnant project for quite a while now.


        damn stright! I read the Xfree mailing-list around the time when Keith Packard was kicked out of Xfree. David Wexelblat was flaming Keith like there's no tomorrow. Now, Keith is just about the best thing that has happened to X in a long time. He was the one who made all those cool new features (like RENDER-extension). He was the one who was driving the developement of Xfree forward. And they kicked him out.

        Who is this Wexelblat-guy who was flaming Keith? He's one of the guys who started Xfree and a member of the core-team. By his own admission, he doesn't hack Xfree anymore. He doesn't even USE Xfree anymore. He said that he uses Windows these days. Only X-related thing he does is that he lurks in the mailinglist.

        Keith Packard gets kicked out, while useless deadbeats like Wexelblat are member of the Core. I'd say the sooner Xfree dies off, the better.

  • device drivers??? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by brokencomputer ( 695672 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @07:45PM (#9299820) Homepage Journal
    All the device drivers for ati and nvidia are written for XFree86. These enable 3d acceleration and I'm not sure they are compatible with X.org... Does this mean that we will have to get the already hesitant ati to start new drivers after x months of slow but steady improvement?

  • full changelog text (Score:5, Informative)

    by Coneasfast ( 690509 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @07:45PM (#9299827)
    Switched to X11R6.7.0 from X.Org. Thanks to those who sent comments to
    x@slackware.com. Seems the community has spoken, because the opinions were
    more than 4 to 1 in favor of using the X.Org release as the default version
    of X. I think I've heard just about every side to this issue now, and it was
    only after careful consideration and testing that this decision was made.
    It's primarily (as is usual around here) a technical decision. Nearly
    everyone else is going with X.Org and it seems to me that sticking with
    XFree86 it spite of this would be asking for compatibility trouble (indeed,
    we saw some issues between X.Org and XFree86 4.4.0 until a few things in
    XFree86 were patched). I also noticed that the ATI Radeon binary drivers
    designed for XFree86 4.3.0 do not work with XFree86 4.4.0, but do work with
    the X.Org release. Something I'm *not* in favor of is dragging around two
    nearly identical projects, so XFree86 4.4.0 has been moved to the /pub/slackware/unsupported/ directory on the FTP site.

    I'd like to take this moment to thank the XFree86 Project for all the truly
    amazing work they've done all these years, and to wish the project the best
    of luck. Slackware owes the XFree86 Project a debt of gratitude and will
    always include the XFree86 acknowledgement, even if we are no longer
    shipping XFree86.

    it seems the reason is for compatibility since other distros are moving to X.org too, not because of the license change

    • Re:full changelog text (Score:4, Insightful)

      by base3 ( 539820 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @07:55PM (#9299894)
      it seems the reason is for compatibility since other distros are moving to X.org too, not because of the license change

      Or they could be taking the high road and being tactful, rather than coming right out and saying it's because of the license changes.

    • Re:full changelog text (Score:5, Informative)

      by 13Echo ( 209846 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @08:18PM (#9300017) Homepage Journal
      One thing that Pat noted is that the ATI drivers will not work with XF86 4.4. This is incorrect. It's a matter of forcing XF86 to pretend it is a 4.39 PRE release or something, however the driver is binary compatible with XF86 4.4.

      The easiest solution is to go with X.org instead though.
  • ap/joe-3.1-i486-1.tgz: Upgraded to joe-3.1. Now with Klingon support!

    The long national nightmare is over! Finally, I can sleep easily, knowing that all those years of intensive study have been recognized, and in some way, appreciated.

  • Why bother? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <slashdot@nOSpam.keirstead.org> on Monday May 31, 2004 @07:48PM (#9299856)
    I don't understand what Dawes' problem is. Why would he change the license such that a) no distros want to use the software, and b) no one wants to develop the software? It seems to me like he signed his own death warrant.

    Why didn't he just back down? It is totally boggling to me, since it is quite obvious that within a year the XFree86.org X server will now not only not be in use by anyone, but also be totally obsolete.

    • Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by GigsVT ( 208848 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @08:09PM (#9299974) Journal
      It's just a classic story of ego causing someone to "go down with the ship"..

      Oh well, if anything this is a story of how Free software has a real advantage over anything where the author has more control, if the author goes insane or makes a bad decision, just fork and forget. This is a best case too, since there's not many people willing to maintain a redundant fork, so it's not really dividing community resources.

    • Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by RedWizzard ( 192002 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @08:09PM (#9299978)
      I don't understand what Dawes' problem is.
      I think he's failed to adapt to the changing way in which people expect to be able to contribute. XFree86 development used to work ok, but now people expect more responsiveness and a more open process. Dawes has been slow to react to this change, and when things have come to a head (e.g. with the Keith Packard incidents) he's been slow to implement changes that were inevitable due to the will of the community. That's caused a lot of bad feeling. The latest license change is really a bit of a storm in a teacup, but it's been the last straw for a lot of people.

      I think the XFree86 inner circle should have seen the writing on the wall and got rid of Dawes a long time ago. Especially given Dawes' apparently grating personality (not a recommended trait for your project leader). I can only imagine that they largely felt/feel the same way he does. Now their project appears to be on the fast track to irrelevancy.

      • Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 31, 2004 @09:08PM (#9300238)
        The latest license change is really a bit of a storm in a teacup, but it's been the last straw for a lot of people.

        And now that we've hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.

    • He sabotaged the project (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jgardn ( 539054 ) <jgardn@alumni.washington.edu> on Monday May 31, 2004 @08:13PM (#9299997) Homepage Journal
      I think he did the only logical thing and purposely sabotaged the project. When he saw the abysmal state of XFree86 development compared to the rest of the free software community, and the exodus of mindshare to various other projects, he decided to sink the ship and get all those on board to a different project with a better community.

      • Re:He sabotaged the project (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Crazy Eight ( 673088 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @10:15PM (#9300557)
        That's possible, but why not simply do what needed to be done internally to make the project healthy? If that wasn't possible then why not simply pull the plug? And if he couldn't do that then why would he feel the need to alienate 2nd tier developers before enacting Operation Self-Destruct. If he really wanted XFree86 to be supplanted by a fork he had options that would have allowed him to walk away without having to stick around and paste "We're still here (for a while, at least)." messages on the website. This "self-sacrifice" interpretation has got to account for a lot of gratuitous cultivation of a bad rep -- whether it's justified or not.

    • Re:Why bother? (Score:4, Funny)

      by metamatic ( 202216 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @09:59PM (#9300477) Homepage Journal

      Why didn't he just back down?

      Same reason people kept developing GNOME even after the licensing issues with Qt and KDE were resolved. Ego.

  • If there were known licensing issues to begin with (Score:4, Interesting)

    by phoxix ( 161744 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @07:50PM (#9299864)
    Why did Slackware and NetBSD stick to XFree98 4.4.0 to begin with ?

    Sunny Dubey

  • I know this is dumb/offtopic but... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by foidulus ( 743482 ) * on Monday May 31, 2004 @07:50PM (#9299868)
    Which version of X does OS X use?

  • fragmentation concerns (Score:4, Insightful)

    by quelrods ( 521005 ) * <quel@quel[ ].net ['rod' in gap]> on Monday May 31, 2004 @07:51PM (#9299874) Homepage
    My primary concern would of course be diverging X releases. While some may adopt X.org I would bet many will continue on using xfree86. In fact the majority that do oppose the new license will most likely keep their own fork in house. Will all this divergence lead to good or just confusion?

    • Re:fragmentation concerns (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Erwos ( 553607 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @08:05PM (#9299956)
      "I would bet many will continue on using xfree86"

      Why? Every major distro has switched at this point. New distributions are almost always forks ("derivatives") of popular distributions (typically RH/Fedora, Slack, or Debian), so it's unlikely that any new distributions are going to be using XF86.

      If other older, less popular distros keep using it, who cares? No one's going to waste time supporting XF86 if it only has .1% of the Linux marketshare. I mean, have you _ever_ heard of anyone putting any serious effort into supporting MetroX or AcceleratedX? Of course not. Those X servers didn't hurt Linux, and neither will XF86.

      -Erwos

    • Re:fragmentation concerns (Score:5, Informative)

      by N1KO ( 13435 ) <nico.bonada@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Monday May 31, 2004 @08:12PM (#9299990)
      It seems most distributions/BSDs have switched to X.org. Except for NetBSD, Connectiva and a couple of smaller distros.

  • yummy... (Score:5, Funny)

    by templest ( 705025 ) <xiplst@@@gmail...com> on Monday May 31, 2004 @08:04PM (#9299949) Homepage Journal
    Now that we've got a stable, mature, and well rounded XServer...

    Fuck it, let's make a new one.

    I know everything you can possibly flame me for in this post, It's a joke. mod me funny :)

  • Can you hear that noise? (Score:5, Funny)

    by mcc ( 14761 ) <amcclure@purdue.edu> on Monday May 31, 2004 @08:06PM (#9299959) Homepage
    That wierd sort of rattling? Yeah. That's the sound of the open source development process functioning properly... ^_^

  • Implications of a move toward X.org (Score:5, Informative)

    by base_chakra ( 230686 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @08:46PM (#9300144)
    Widespread adoption of X.org Server could also lead to the full integration of auxilliary X.org projects, such as Xinerama [sourceforge.net], into X11 as standard features.

    X.org Server is the MIT/X [tldp.org] license's flagship product (in an inverse sort of way), so I think it's also a good possibility that the systematic proliferation of X.org's server may magnify the popularity of its license among OSS developers in general (it's an interesting license!).

  • I can speak for ATI when I say (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Man in Spandex ( 775950 ) <prsn@kev.gmail@com> on Monday May 31, 2004 @08:46PM (#9300145)
    they still work but their still pitiful. Frankly this is off topic but I just wish that ATI could just put more heart into their drivers like Nvidia does. I've read that they are writing from scratch the win32 opengl driver. Is it that hard to get some crazy linux driver developpers?

    I'm glad that slack switched to X.org. Doing the DropLine-Gnome update, I accepted to update everything thus replacing Xfree 4.4 by X.org and everything works smoothly, and I for one welcome our new and improved system to remind them that I am satisfied.

  • Default != big deal (Score:5, Informative)

    by twigles ( 756194 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @08:47PM (#9300149)
    I had to upgrade my FreeBSD desktop from XFree86 4.3 to 4.4 to get my Radeon 9200 to work. Know what? It took about ten minutes and entailed downloading a bunch of packages and running the install script. Not a big problem.

    It's true that noobies and most people who don't really care about the GUI will stick with whatever is the default but I'm simply not worried about compatibility. As always (in the *nix world) we have a choice.

  • Difference? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by beforewisdom ( 729725 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @08:49PM (#9300161)
    From user land, are there any visible differences?

    Steve

    • Re:Difference? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 31, 2004 @09:07PM (#9300229)
      Nope. Fonts are in /usr/share/fonts instead of usr/lib/X11R6/fonts (or whatever it was), and the config file in /etc/X11/ is named xorg.conf instead, but these aren't things a typical user will notice or care about.

      The only overt difference is that it seems slightly faster.

  • X.org for linux, XFree86 for *BSD (Score:5, Informative)

    by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @09:05PM (#9300217) Homepage Journal
    Just what we need, another rift between OSS projects, making it a potential PR nightmare "see, those OSS guys cant cooperate on anything and have multiple subsystem 'standards'" "choose us, we have one consistent standard ".

    " they even cant decide on their desktop, they have silly looking feet and strange K-menus " " and a thousand other incompatible, duplicated efforts "

    And yes I realize both X's are from the same code base TODAY.. but that will slowly change over time as they go down different paths.

    Disclaimer: I'm a FBSD user, and do use KDE... but I can see how this can be twisted around easily in the press.

  • Cygwin uses X.org X11 server also! (Score:5, Informative)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @09:14PM (#9300256) Journal
    I use cygwin on a daily basis, was nice to see that on an upgrade it removed all of Xfree and upgraded to X.org X11 server.

    Seems everyone is ditching Xfree. (About damn time too!)

    BTW, those use mentioned screen because they don't want to use a mouse. There are X window managers like EvilWM [sourceforge.net] or Ratpoison [sourceforge.net] that are mouseless. Though, my favorite WM is IceWM [icewm.org] with the PicoGUI [freshmeat.net] theme. Though I like to modify it with additional buttons. Freshmeat has a ton of themes for it.

    • Re:Cygwin uses X.org X11 server also! (Score:5, Informative)

      by codemachine ( 245871 ) on Tuesday June 01, 2004 @01:17AM (#9301171)
      Cygwin ditched XFree86.org a long time ago. They got fed up with the lack of CVS access and XFree's refusal to integrate patches. They were probably the first "vendor" to break off, although trouble between individual developers (such as Keith Packard) and XFree had already started at this point.

      For a while Cygwin maintained their own fork of XFree with their own patches for lack of any better option, but thankfully now they don't have to do that.

      I'm too lazy to look any links for you though.

  • X.org on gentoo (Score:5, Informative)

    by tangent3 ( 449222 ) on Monday May 31, 2004 @09:44PM (#9300388)
    I migrated from xfree86 to X.org easily following the guide here [gentoo.org]. Basically, unmerge xfree and xfs, emerge xfs and xorg-x11, and copy XF86config into /etc/xorg.conf

    Install from scratch instructions can be found here [gentoo.org].

  • Regardless. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Raven42rac ( 448205 ) * on Monday May 31, 2004 @11:51PM (#9300906)
    While Slackware's decision to use x.o may be a compatibility issue, the fact still remains that many other distros have ditched xfree86 for the licensing issue. What basically happens is that everyone starts using something new, because everyone is using something new. I think three things contributed to slackware's decision. 1) The ATI driver situation. 2) Compatibility between distros. 3) The licensing. I am fairly certain that 3, while not mentioned, had at least a minor role in the decision. It is the proverbial "elephant in the room".

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