X.Org Server 1.11 Released

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix is reporting that X.Org Server 1.11 has been officially released to users of Linux and other operating systems. This time around their reporting is more detailed than the official release announcement."

Re:Why does X let my entire OS crash?

[high]

Starting from Vista, Windows runs as much as possible of the driver in userspace which means that if it craches it just restarts the driver resulting in a quick blink on the screen and you're back to normal.

Re:RTFA.

[headkase]

I have the opposite situation. My hardware is too new. 6870 Radeon, intel Core i5. Doesn't work right. But, I'm running inside of VirtualBox and it abstracts all that hardware away. It even supports 3D with a guest addition to expose that to OpenGL. My desktop right now in front of me is composited with compiz and plays video, wobbly windows and all just fine.

I know there are barriers when you go to upgrade old hardware: change piece A and you need to change piece B and such, but, really, leave it at a text console as a server or just pick up a cheap $299 laptop that a modern Linux will run just fine with intel video drivers. Intel video drivers over the years surprisingly have given me the fewest issues and they support compiz just fine too.

Re:Better Graphics

[VVelox]

The performance issues are not an X issue, but a driver issue.

The major issue when it comes to performance and X is the drivers, which are largely crap. Unfortunately there is very little information on the internals of most cards, which makes writing good drivers complex or damn near impossible. This also requires a nice bit of programming and math knowledge in various areas.

Changing graphics server technology won't fix this issue.

Re:Switching of GFX card on-the-fly

[Paradigm_Complex]

The two-graphics-card scheme you're talking about was developed by nVidia; it is called "Optimus."

There is an open source project to get this stuff to work with Linux/X11, called bumblebee. See here:

https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee/ [github.com]

If you want a more specific guide for using bumblebee with your specific laptop/distro combination, you may be able to find one if you look around. For example:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1763742 [ubuntuforums.org]

I can't vouche for bumblebee; I've never actually tried it myself. However, it seems to be exactly what you're looking for. Let's hope it's a solid project, as Optimus is becoming more and more popular and nVidia doesn't seem to have any plans to support it on Linux, with a open source driver or otherwise.

Re:Switching of GFX card on-the-fly

[Anonymous Coward]

Nvidia implementation is called optimus [wikipedia.org], and nvidia has already said "go fuck yourself" in response to "will you support this on linux".

Initial linux support is being carried out in the Bumblebee Project [github.com], bleeding edge branch is called Ironhide [github.com]. I have no idea about the AMD version because I'm not affected by it.

Ha, captcha is "ashamed", as Nvidia should be for releasing this shit.