The next major version of XFree86, the popular X11 windowing system for Unix, is now available from XFree86’s FTP server and its mirrors. Version 4.3.0 offers many new features, including the RandR extension, new mouse cursors, better font engine, better ATi Radeon support and much more.
XFree86 4.3.0 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Some of these things probably don’t effect you.
Font Engine) Most distributions link Xft dynamically with libfreetype, so the static one in X is not used. If you’re rendering through Xft (ie. have anti-aliasing) this probably doesn’t effect you. 2.1.1 isn’t that good of a release anyway. The real cool changes happened in 2.1.2, 2.1.3, and 2.1.4
Radeon Support)
Updated Mesa) Only used for software rendering and the DRI drivers. Most people serious about 3D on Linux use the NVIDIA or Radeon binary drivers, which have their own code instead of Mesa.
I have FreeBSD 5 up and running, and my goal is to get the latest version of everything running, just for the hell of it
If I follow HowTos and such for proper font rendering/de-uglyfication/whatever that covered XFree 4.2, will this same stuff work for 4.3?
The new XFree is pretty stable to my knowledge, even if I only used a pre-release on Red Hat 8.1 Phoebe-3 a few days ago. It is a nice upgrade.
Does anyone know if this addresses the issue of the “stolen RAM” with the i830 video on laptops? I know there have been some pathches and other workarounds, but I read a comment somewhere that this woul offially fix compatibility. I hope so, its what is keeping Linux off my laptop right now. I just don’t have much hacking skills beyond booting from a CD.
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| (Radeon Support, Updated Mesa)
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| Only used for software rendering and the DRI drivers.
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Only!?
Go DRI!
Does anyone know if this addresses the issue of the “stolen RAM” with the i830 video on laptops?
Yes. Yes it does. Been running pres for ages for exactly this reason.
pkgconfig, libxml2, fontconfig, xrandr, xft2, xcursor…….
…….aren’t these all libraries and things written by the GNOME people ? Why is it included in XFree and what does KDE people think about this ? Looks like GNOME is dominating everything these days.
aren’t these all libraries and things written by the GNOME people
No. fontconfig, xrandr, xft2 and xcursor are all things written by the XF team. Not sure about libxml, but this is a supporting library used by fontconfig to parse config files.
fontconfigt and xft2 form the base of a sophisticated font substitution, configuration and rendering system
xrandr allows the frame buffer to be resized and the refresh rate changed on the fly.
xcursor is an extension which provides facilities for animated, alpha blended coloured cursors.
X has deviated so far from the needs of the common standalone desktop user, that it’s fast becoming more of a liability than an asset.
It’s time to do away with X and bring on something else.
Call me a Troll, but everytime X is discussed, people post messages like this one. There must be a reason…
libxml was donated by the GNOME foundation to the world. The justification was that it was already the most compliant XML library on *NIX so why force others to replicate the same thing? So, in a sense, KDE should be greatful to GNOME.
> fontconfig, xrandr, xft2 and xcursor are all things written by the XF team.
That is not entirely true. A bunch of GNOME people are working hand in hand with the XF people. A lot of messages has been changed between GNOME, XF and FREEDESKTOP people (usually the same ones). LibXML2 is written by Daniel Veillard who is working on the GNOME documentation project as well. XrandR, Xft2 and fontconfig are written by Keith Packard, Jim Gettys and some others. The first 2 named ones are working, advocating for GNOME. Jim Gettys also wears a special position in the GNOME community. XCursor was written by someone in the GNOME community too. pkgconfig is a configuration system primarily written by Havoc Pennington and has it’s roots in the GNOME world to be an alternative for the *-config scripts. I see this implementation on 2 different sides, the one side it adds an extra complexity for searchpaths that the administrator needs to care for (PKG_CONFIG_DIR as export) and on the otherhand it requires a static version of glib1.x to actually do something (bundeled with pkgconfig). From what I heard (and I may be mistaken here) is that even a bunch of normal codechange specially requested by the GNOME people for better support of GNOME made into xfree 4.3.0 and a bunch of WMSPECS changes. I don’t know if all this is the right way to go by adding a new amount of complexity and requirements to XFREE. But this is my personal oppinion.
It’s time to do away with X and bring on something else.
Call me a Troll, but everytime X is discussed, people post messages like this one. There must be a reason…
Yes, there is. It’s because there are lots of people who get a kick out of starting arguments by posting tripe like this without offering any factual arguments whatsoever to back up their statements.
Sure we can do without rehashing this lame argument again. If you come up with something you like better, feel free to use it. I like X and use its features everyday.
Yes, Owen Taylor worked a lot on these stuff, and some other people from Red Hat’s UI team, among others. Now, it happens that these same people from Red Hat and elsewhere, are also part of Gnome’s developer team.
There, the mystery solved…
He is, after all, a devoted TWM user, and author of the Qt code to hook to XRENDER (which he wrote too).
He is really a X guy.
Actually what you wrote is true. They worked indeed on XFree86. The question is, if it’s fair against the KDE team by taking away the freedom for them and other Desktop developers. Look many people who use KDE for example use it because they don’t like GNOME for any reasons and it’s not nice forcing them to use an XFree86 release which is stuffed with GNOME material. I don’t want to judge wether this was a good or bad decision. I leave this to other people but I think it’s necessary to mention this so people know what they are up to.
The question is, if it’s fair against the KDE team…
Yes I agree Martin. I don’t think it is fair for the KDE people.
Martin, you can’t be serious. XFree86 is NOT stuffed with Gnome material. XFree86 is simply X11 in pure C code. And XFree86 works _perfectly_ with KDE as it does with 100 more DEs and window managers. In fact, they have tested this stuff before releasing XFree.
Please don’t give replies to this matter, is really not serious! And if KDE people want to see their name in the credits, then all they have to do is contribute code and “fight” with the Gnome people on how much code each team contributes. This way _everyone_ gets benefits and most of all, the user. Bitching that Gnome people (actually, Red Hat people) are coding more than others and they shouldn’t, is just not serious.
Actually, reading Martin’s and Alex’s replies (no offence
, I think I have seen it all on the internet… Now I do realize that no matter what you say, or what you explain, or what you do, there will always be people who don’t get it, or who simply create issues when there are none…
People can wear two hats.
Just because Alan Cox works at Redhat doesn’t mean I can
characterize his Kernel efforts as Redhat code.
Ditto for most of the people you mentioned.
I have gotten used to the idea that Gnome
and Kde aren _not_ like the two fellows who have the reverse black and white bilaterall skin colouring , cluthing at each others throats through all eternity. eacho other.
Nice try, though. :>
Well please grab the XFree86 sourcecode and investigate yourself. Everyone else should do the same in case in not beliving.
And Eugenia, how should KDE people write better code to XFree86 while this is not their project. Their objective is to work on KDE and keep everything around KDE in a good state. GNOME developers should do the same with GNOME and not spent time on other projects they are not involved in. These libraries are written by people who work on GNOME and got implemented as such in XFree86 because they have a better wire to the XFree86 development team. Sure many of these libraries have no negative effect on their own and If I as user am forced to use these libraries then please provide links where I might leech and install them on demand but shipping them with XFree86 is not wise. It starts with one project and soon every other project is inheriting it and at the final end we use KDE but half of our System has something to do with GNOME because of the requirements the libraries and packages inherited.
That’s my whole point. KDE is playing in it’s own cage, if the developers think, they need some extra library they suggest you to grab and install it without forcing their stuff on other people. I would like to see the same with the GNOME project. It’s sad to force other people to use things they mostly not like to have bundeled with it just because 4-5 GNOME hackers think that this is required for their own projects profit.
Said again, nothing against the libraries, nothing against the developers, those who write these libraries are people that support this community with nice things which we all should speak out or respect for but bundeling everything into one project and force people who don’t like GNOME or want to keep their system GNOME free (or KDE free of course the same counts for KDE) is not ok.
I give you another example and then I stop writing and listen to what other people reply to me.
Look at openssl, libpng, audiofile, fontconfig, xcursor and a lot of other tools, libraries if leeched separately. Let’s view all these things neutrally and not categorize it to either GNOME or KDE then why do they all provide pkgconfig support. This only suggest people that these tools are laid out to be prefered to be used by GNOME mainly. look KDE doesn’t use pkgconfig so it can’t read these configuration files. More applications and libraries to come. Well this was a more or less OT reply but I thought worth to mention.
oops I left something out,making my reference too oblique
for even my taste
should read:
..Gnome and Kde aren _not_ like the two fellows from the t Star Trek (orignal series) episode who have black and white bilaterall skin colouring in reverse to each other, , cluthing at each others throats through all eternity.
actually they are Larry Ellison and Bill Gates. :>
> Their objective is to work on KDE and keep everything around KDE in a good state. GNOME developers should do the same with GNOME and not spent time on other projects they are not involved in.
I am sorry, but this is downright wrong. If someone -anyone- can contribute code to anything and help a proeject, let him do it. Red Hat employees have project managers who tell them: “John Doe, this year you need to work on this, this and this, because we need that and that.” So, John goes and works on this and that, and that might include Gnome, XFree, KDE, Asteroids, Gimp, Firewalls and whatever else is needed to be done in the company.
That doesn’t mean that “gnome people” are having “better wires” to xfree. It is simply work to be done by INDIVIDUALS or COMPANIES, and they have to do what they have to do, because they have to.
This XFree release is not a Gnome release, EVEN if there are people working on both projects because they need to.
And if Red Hat helps Gnome, well, SuSE and Mandrake support KDE. All they have to do, Mandrake and SuSE, are get into coding with XFree as well (I know that at least SuSE does). So, there is not a problem of libraries here, because it is XFree’s policy to include ALL the libraries needed in their tarballs, so there is absolutely no dependancy on Gnome or anything else when installing XFree.
I will stop replying on the issue right now, because simply, there is no issue.
Martin – if XFree86 want to use libxml (as tons of other projects do, whether GNOME-based or not) then fair enough – it’s not a UI component, it’s for parsing XML files. It’s not as if XFree86 could “become” GNOME through this. They all tend to use, say, libpng, too – because it’s useful and generic.
Eugenia – Martin’s comment is not unreasonable. If this is your “I’ve seen it all on the net” eureka moment, maybe you should get out a bit more often….
> look KDE doesn’t use pkgconfig so it can’t read these configuration files.
From the Pkg-config site on FreeDesktop.org (which is an organization which goal is to support BOTH KDE and Gnome):
“pkg-config is a system for managing library compile/link flags that works with automake and autoconf. It replaces the ubiquitous *-config scripts you may have seen with a single tool. There’s nothing desktop-specific or desktop-related about pkg-config, despite it being on freedesktop.org.”
http://www.freedesktop.org/software/pkgconfig/
>Martin’s comment is not unreasonable.
Sorry, but I do find it unreasonable, so it is that eureka moment you mention.
Hello Eugenia, you are missing one point here.
> From the Pkg-config site on FreeDesktop.org (which is an
> organization which goal is to support BOTH KDE and Gnome):
Doesn’t mean that KDE are forced to use it. PKGCONFIG and FREEDESKTOP.org are ideas and implementations of Havoc Pennington. You can’t come up and assume that when soemone in the GNOME community has an idea that KDE people jump up and imediately going to implement or use this. Maybe you haven’t realized until now (and I like to be fair sounding person now) but both projects are differently. I do agree that XFREE should not imclude all this cruft written by GNOME. Even if this is a place where people may comment on the subjects written here and even if we as guests respect you and your place here but this doesn’t give you as host of the place the right to disrespect other peoples opinion. FREEDESKTOP.org which you are refering to all the time is a source of discussion not a place where 2 sides force their shit on each others neck.
> PKGCONFIG and FREEDESKTOP.org are ideas and implementations of Havoc Pennington
So what? Read here:
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=2899#76726
I happen to agree with ~90% of what Havoc advocates. You are free to disagree of course!
> Maybe you haven’t realized until now (and I like to be fair sounding person now) but both projects are different.
You think I don’t know that? But I always advocated that both projects should be working on compatible standards for the good of the platform.
> I do agree that XFREE should not imclude all this cruft written by GNOME.
LIKE WHAT? Examples please!! libXML is a generic lib pretty much!
> FREEDESKTOP.org which you are refering to all the time is a source of discussion not a place where 2 sides force their shit on each others neck.
Actually, it is a place for discussing and coding towards a unified future. Mostly coding.
Oh and a final note in case to sound disrespective now. Not everything in this Linux/Unix/BSD community is turning around GNOME or KDE. These are simply 2 projects maintained by 2 different groups of people. The majority of people using Linux don’t care at all for GNOME and KDE, they totally hate it. So we should also respect these people that don’t like either of them, we have no rights forcing them to use stuff they probably not like to see. You can’t expect people to contribute patches to have these things removed again, you can’t even expect patches to be written by everyone. Hell if I should write patches for all the shit that I don’t like then I need 20 lifes for it and 24hrs fulltime working on it. Everyone at the final end is responsible for his own project and should care for it as good as possible and use his own brain to fix the stuff or think about these cases.
How exactly do you specify compiler options for building it. I’ve got all sorts of stuff that I’ve found out there to turn them on, but none of them seem to work. I just want some -march=pentium4 -O3 compiled XFree86.
> I do agree that XFREE should not imclude all this cruft written by GNOME.
Why is it cruft? If it is fully working code that does not require external dependancies and does the job, then it is good to be included in any project! As long as it does the job and does it the way it is indented! Why re-invent the wheel and rewrite code? just because it is “from planet mars and not from planet venus”? In my mind, that doesn’t make any sense! We are talking about open code here, and re-usable code, and if that code works and works well, then it is welcome to be part on ANY project! That’s my stance on this non-issue.
Don’t bother replying btw, I am not going to reply again to this non-issue, I have some dinner & cooking that I will have to attend to.
Ok Eugenia, please calm down for a second, we are just talking about software here. I like to have a friendly relationship with you and everyone else here no need to get impulsive even if we both are temperamental persons.
First of all KDE and GNOME are two different projects with two different targets in mind. GNOME likes it simple and KDE don’t. GNOME likes reversed button order KDE don’t and here we hit a big problem already. Some of the KDE and GNOME developers like to work with GNOME and KDE and many others not. We speak about individuals here. It’s nice to see that KDE and GNOME are trying to find a way to work together as close as possible but many of these ideas are simply hot the first 2-3 days after announcement and then get down after a while.
FreeDesktop.org as it got announced it was a nice place for a couple of weeks but then things went down because people relaized things are too differently.
HACI page (the 2 unified HIGS) the idea was made by 2 people but not everyone on either KDE or GNOME side agree with that deal. Look at the mailinglist, you see how much NO ACTION there is. A few written mails the first 2-3 days and then silence.
We both know that GNOME likes it simple, as written previously but not everyone in the GNOME community is happy with that (this includes me and certaily a bunch of other people). Now look at what KDE people are replying to their developers on the KDE page some days ago..
http://dot.kde.org/1045709612/
You see people are replying and arguing differently here. While on the GNOME side people are favorisiting HP’s view of things on the KDE side people usually favorisite the view of Mosfet. I as GNOME user don’t agree with many decisions made by HP but we need to find a way to convince him and others that things can be done better but it’s not always easy.
Please repect my opinion that I think that FREEDESKTOP.org is not the source of wisdom. And now that you came up with funny links all the time let me point you to one too
> Nothing on this site should be taken to be endorsed by any
> entity,
http://www.freedesktop.org/about/
It’s just a communications place. Even I see an advantage of having a coperation between KDE and GNOME and see them merge one day but the target audience and the people outside are those we need to respect, not the personal opinion. Even if all KDE developers and GNOME developers agree to cooperate (which is not the case) then you shouldn’t ignore the users and what they like and what wishes they have. Same I see for XFREE all this GNOME stuff inside is not required to be there and should not be there. As written earlier please respect that not everything on linux, bsd and unix is turning around GNOME or KDE, many people simply don’t like either of them, we also need to respect the whishes of these people. You have no right to dictate me your own opinion. I have read it, I respect it and that’s finally it. We simply talk about software and we shouldn’t get personal.
True true….not everything on Linux revolves around KDE and Gnome. I have used XFCE as my window manager for 2 years and its nice and fast and stable. And it actually starts up in less than 10 minutes unlike some other more bloated window managers:)
PS Indian movies really suck…
XFree86 used an XML parsing library written by the GNOME project. I’ve used many things that link to GTK that aren’t part of the GNOME project, even though GTK is. Haven’t you?
Eugenia s right. This is a non-issue. Or are you folks of the “using Emacs means total agreement with Richard Stallman” mindset, too?
Martin –
I’ll just point out that when the KDE folks wanted an XML parser for their documentation system, they chose libxml2. In other words, one of the libraries you’re so concerned about being forced down their throats in X they’ve already chosen to use themselves and included in their own packages.
So by virtue of what oGALAXYo aka. Martin said collaboration ™ is a bad thing..
Tasty…
I do think that things happen because some people take the lead to make it happen.
Such as HP:s effort with freedesktop.
And why did he do that? well becasue he wants interoperability /and codesharing/ which is the ground of the OSS philosophy, We work TOGETHER to make things happen.
And we use the tools that make sense (what eugenia said)
I believe that Eugenia’s point is that these “GNOME” libraries aren’t really ‘libraries that GNOME depends on’, but ‘libraries that happen to be developed by GNOME developers’.
The one’s mentioned above have nothing to do with GNOME. They’re generic libraries that have a place in the XFree86 distribution.
Let’s look at them one by one…
pkgconfig – A system for managing library compilations and link flags. It has nothing to do with desktop environments. If XFree86 developers find this useful, what’s wrong with them using it?
libxml2 – A library for parsing XML. Once again, it doesn’t imply a specific DE. Any application that needs to parse XML can use this. If XFree86 needs to parse XML files, this library provides the needed functionality. Why would the developers even want to implement their own XML parsing routines, when there’s a robust, free implementation availabe?
fontconfig/xft2 – Font rendering. XFree86 needs to render fonts, no? Other window managers, desktop environments and applications make use of these too (Fluxbox, XFCE, and others I don’t know of off the top of my head).
XRandR/XCursor – These are X extensions that once again have nothing to do with desktop environments. XRandR is especially welcome. Have you ever wanted to dynamically resize your X desktop? Remember how easy it is to do in a Win32 operating system? Now it can be just as easy with X. Do you want to reject this extension because it’s developers happen to contribute to the GNOME project also? It’s the same situation with XCursor.
It seems that you guys are grabbing at straws. The bottom line is that XFree86 now has more functionality. GNOME developers helped out. I appreciate it.
Where do you all get the idea that a developer known for contributing to a particular project (GNOME) should not help develop others (XFree86, etc.)?
Cheers mate for taking the time to write what i wanted to write down.!
kudos
Rob.
Well I already told you once to cut my writings out of context. I simply expressed my own opinion and the opinions of some of my friends that I know good. If you have a different opinion then you are welcome to share them and you are also welcome to change my mind in this situation. You are not welcome to make some sort of rant out of it.
As I wrote previously and people only read half. I think that embedding these libraries in XFREE is not the best solution, this doesn’t mean that I don’t like the implementations it’s simply that personally I don’t like it to be there. Why do we need another gnome-xml specially while XFREE statically links to it. It could use a standard system library on request and share this library with other programs, same with the other things. Eugenia said correctly that code duplication is not necessary so why does XFREE duplicate a whole library when this one can be used by other apps as well when it’s shared ?
Ok for the pkgconfig part that someone else wrote here. Before you tell me what pkgconfig is (which I know perfectly on my own what it is) tell me what was wrong with the *-config files used years before ? I think nothing was wrong by using them but now we need to deal with another dependency which depend itself ong a statically linked glib 1.x version.
Before we could straightly search for the *-config scriptfile when we need a library for compile and now we need to use pkgconfig which is an extra complexity.
Next time you reply to me (and I have no problems with a normal conversation with you) please do it in a normal respective way and not the way you did.
but please, in what way was it cut in half and disrespectfull, I clearly pointed out the intent of the matter as I saw it.
and btw it wasn’t a rant ;D
btw disrespectfull is to reply to it by trying to ridicule the other person as you are doing now, the correct thing would be to email me (that is after all why I supply my email adress)
Or contact me on #gnome where you yourself also reside.
so further replies should be to my email not here.
As others have pointed out by now, KDE can benefit from most (if not all) of the libraries added to X. It really doesnt matter who writes them.
KDE already have experimental support for xrandr and xcursor. IIRC, the only thing that prevents it from going into CVS is waiting for trolltech to release a version of QT that supports these features.
As for freedesktop.org, yes it is used for discussions, but if you follow the kde mailinglists (and possibly the gnome ones too, i just dont follow those myself) you will see quite a lot of discussions, often followed up with code implementing the new specifications. So if you dont think freedesktop.org, or havoc pennington, matters, then you are clearly not following the KDE development very closely.
As for mosfet vs HP. As far as i can tell, not many of the KDE developers really care about their arguments. (i say their, even though it looks like it is mostly mosfet doing the argueing). I admire mosfet for his work, but i think most of his ramblings are rather silly. I think the only persons who can be said to speak for most of the KDE developers are exactly that, core KDE developers.
Anyway, i agree with Eugenia here, (which doesnt happen too often this entire argument is rather silly. Im happy that the new version of XFree is out, and im fairly excited about its new features. I dont really think i will use them myself, but im getting tired of answering questions about why resizing the desktop cant be done on the fly. (i still cant see why i would ever want to change my resolution)
Ok let’s be it that way. I brought up my arguments, you brought up yours, as others did and done. No need to get personal for either of us. The one likes pancakes the other likes beefsteak. At the final end it’s all about matter of taste. Although I pesonally don’t like this situation with XFREE right, there is no need to make some unnice situation out of it at the final end it’s software only and everyone could make his or her own opinion.
Have a nice weekend.
If I was a programmer with the XFree team who had just spent weeks of coding and I came over here and saw this, I’d feel like I just worked my butt off for a bunch of primates who never evolved. I agree that Gnome leaves a lot to be desired. For that matter, in some areas KDE leaves a lot to be desired. RedHat leaves a lot to be desired.
But this is XFree86, and it’s getting better because of these people. Gnome and KDE are getting better all the time too. Give these people time to make their projects better and stop treating them like they’re enslaving us.
Personally, I use FVWM. So there.
P.S. (The RandR extension is the best part. I’ve been wanting to change my desktop size during a session for eons now — and I mean the real size, not just zooming in and out of a virtual desktop larger than the screen size with <Ctrl>-<Alt>-<+>/<->…fantastic!)
Mate, Great Teamwork on the Xfree project .
Don’t worry about us primates we like to beat our drums senseless around here.
a new born baby and a school boy – that’s the difference
You must be foreign, as only a non-native speaker (Like Eugenia the Grand Mistress of Misspellings) could have a bunch of unfounded, lame statements (such as you have had) AND have them not actually make sense or sound right.
Go troll elsewhere.
Those of you that are concerned or trolling about how much influence GNOME supporters have over the direction of XFree86’s development should remember that all the early work on Render and on anti-aliased text was sponsored by SuSE, who we all know is a strong KDE supporter. SuSE has also sponsored the development of more drivers for XFree86 than all the other Linux vendors put together. The vice-president of the legal entity that controls XFree86 is SuSE’s former CTO, Dirk H"ohndel.
If Red Hat and HP (both Jim Gettys and Keith Packard are employed by HP currently – and that’s Hewlett-Packard, not Havoc Pennington – to hack on XFree86) have jumped on board the XFree86 development in a big way recently, it is only because they – and Red Hat in particular – are making up for lost time, having contributed relatively little but
benefited immensely. I think that’s only fair really. I don’t see anyone moaning about what they’ve contributed to XFree86 in a technical sense either, fontconfig, Xrandr and Xcursor are all of equal value whatever desktop you use.
Note also that KDE itself has used libxml for far far longer than XFree86, to parse DocBook-XML helpfiles and transform them into HTML for KHTML to display. It works both ways: XmHTML is still used as a basic HTML rendering engine in some GNOME apps, and that is based on KDE 1’s old khtmlw.
Although there is (justly, I think) some concern that Red Hat (and it’s really about Red Hat, isn’t it?) isn’t playing 100% fair with the rest of the community over some of the changes they have made to open source projects, I don’t see that problem here – all the changes are beneficial to just about everyone.
If XFree86 had, for example, been modified to use GConf for its configuration and that had been forced into the mainline release, then the situation would be different. You’d see people screaming their heads off about that, and rightly so (can you say the word fork?)
Before you and others continue using words like ‘rant’ or ‘troll’ you should learn to read messages till end and not half when replying. And don’t reply while reading the messages and skip the half.
What we talk about all the time is why these libraries are being included with XFREE when they could better be distributed separately. In no time there was a discussion that either XFT, FONTCONFIG, XCUSRORS or XRANDR are something bad or something made by devils. Even by having some gramatically issues and slightly issues of writing sentences correctly you should be intelligent enough to get the sense out of the writings even if not you could have nicely asked if you have understand it correctly. I have the slightly impression that many people read only half and then press the reply button to write feedback. No wonder that there are so much misunderstandings in this community.
Thanks
“..Gnome and Kde aren _not_ like the two fellows from the t Star Trek (orignal series) episode who have black and white bilaterall skin colouring in reverse to each other, , cluthing at each others throats through all eternity.”
That would be Bele and Lokai from Star Treak:Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (1966).
I’m interested. How much programming do you do with any of these libraries? Are you in any position to be making comments?
Why do we need another gnome-xml specially while XFREE statically links to it.
>>>>>>>
It’s not gnome-xml. It’s simply a good XML library that happens to be aprt of the GNOME project. This is an important issue: The GNOME project encompasses a whole lot of things that have nothing to do with the GNOME desktop environment. OpenOffice doesn’t link to GTK or any GNOME libs, but is officially part of GNOME. libxml2 has no dependency on the gnome or gtk libraries, but is part of the GNOME project. LibArt is used in many gnome applications, but has no dependencies on gnome. If you look at the code, you won’t see it include a single GNOME header file. LibRSVG, on the other hand, links to glib, and I *would* have a problem with introducing that dependency into X. However, that won’t happen. Xft, fontconfig, pkgconfig, Xcursor, etc, are all independent of GNOME. Just take look at the source code. No references to GNOME at all. The XFree86 project will *not* introduce any explicit dependency on GNOME. Not now, not ever.
It could use a standard system library on request and share this library with other programs, same with the other things.
>>>>>>>>>
Libxml2 is pretty much that standard library. Lots of things that have nothing to do with GUIs (perl, python) use libxml. Look at it this way. Say entity A creates an entirely independent “system library,” like you mention. Then the GNOME project adopts it as part of GNOME. Isn’t that still the same library? Say the GNOME team releases an offical component that happens to be totally independent of GNOME. Isn’t that component still technologically identical to one made by anybody else?
Eugenia said correctly that code duplication is not necessary so why does XFREE duplicate a whole library when this one can be used by other apps as well when it’s shared ?
>>>>>>
XFree copies lots of code into its tree, like FreeType and Mesa. The main reason is that XFree has specific requirements that sometimes require XFree-specific changes to those libraries, and because changes in core libraries could destabilize the source tree, so its safer to keep things internal.
I think nothing was wrong by using them but now we need to deal with another dependency which depend itself ong a statically linked glib 1.x version.
>>>>>>>>>>
I just ldd’ed pkg-config, and the only two dependencies is libc.so and ld-linux.so, which is pretty much the absolute minimum dependencies possible for a C program. Just checked fontconfig and xft as well. Aside from standard libraries, they depend on FreeType and expat, not a gnome-specific lib in sight.
Besides the fact that the conversation ended some comments ago. Yes I’m in the position to make comments like this because I know what I’m talking.
Look the problem here is you reply with only half the knowledge that is required to understand the whole situation. First off all (And I repeat myself again) there is nothing against these libraries. They are good, effective and nice to have. The whole situation is that I made a statement where I expressed my opinion, that I like to have these libraries as separate libs, not bundeled with XFREE which gives on the one hand the freedom to people to install the System as they like and not as people force us to do.
GNOME-XML (as the initial name says) was THE XML library for GNOME the main purpose and intention was to serve GNOME with XML standards. The library got more and more mature and then separated from GNOME to have it’s own life (as it was told to me from officials working on it). A lot of the comments from what was told to me still cover GNOME as main target usage. Dunno if this got changed.
The last comment with pkgconfig I also like to answer on. This is another system written by GNOME people with the purpose to avoid having some disadvantages that came with the *-config files. The *-config files used to be simple textfiles that contained informations about the location of headerfiles, libraries and so on. To make it understandable now:
Compile libPNG and install it. It provides a libpng-config file that you can call in your own configure script which then detects all the libraries information to be embedded in your own program.
Now someone had the idea to write pkgconfig (it has some advantages sure) meant to be used on GNOME. It takes care of some issues that came with the *-config files but the pkgconfig package itself is something between MY app and the LIBARY I like to use. Another dependency I need to care for. I need to make sure that my configure script searches for pkgconfig and then allow pkgconfig to load all the informations from the library.
Old way:
my configure -> libpng-config
I directly tell libpng-config (only a textfile) to load all the informations.
New way:
my configure -> pkgconfig <- libpng.pc
I now need to tell pkgconfig to load the libpng.pc informatiosn, then pkgconfig passes these information over to me.
Hope it’s clear now. I have my personal opinion about all this, that I explained here and now let’s forget it. Technical skilled people know what I’m talking about.
*reads comments and shakes head*
And to think I have to go to “/.” for this kind of entertainment.
Well to be on topic. I’m waiting for some of this functionality to be exposed at the WM level. Gnome I believe lets you select a particular cursor, but I don’t think KDE does yet. We’re slowly getting there, and after that. The skys the limit.
> I like to have these libraries as separate libs, not bundeled with XFREE which gives on the one hand the freedom to people to install the System as they like and not as people force us to do.
I don’t understand what you are saying. It is like saying “I want the X Server code, but not that part”. But what if X is depended on it and it doesn’t work otherwise??
XFree _always_, since Day1, had the policy to include all the dependancies needed in their tarballs, for the convienience of the user!
So why don’t you just say that you don’t want FreeType either in it then? I mean, Freetype is not an XFree project either, but it is bundled! You have no choice, the code itself makes the choice on what dependancies it needs. Otherwise, you end up with code that doesn’t link and that is unacceptable.
Before you and others continue using words like ‘rant’ or ‘troll’ you should learn to read messages till end and not half when replying. And don’t reply while reading the messages and skip the half.
I’m happy to admit I had only got halfway through the thread before deciding to reply. Perhaps it made me look stupid. I guess I’m too used to threaded conversations. The message was not aimed at you really but Martin, and the points I made are still valid there, I think, even if some of them repeated what others said. I’ll remember to read the comments in one page next time, that way I have to read them all before posting a comment, although Eugenia won’t like it because it’ll reduce her page impressions
Further, I’ll lay off the gentle ad-hominem attacks if you will. OK?
Now, to get on with the meat of your argument:
What we talk about all the time is why these libraries are being included with XFREE when they could better be distributed separately.
If you’re worried about bloat, download XFree86 via cvs and don’t bother downloading the libraries you don’t need. Simple as that. I’m pretty sure that’s what most of the Linux distro packagers do.
It’s just convenience for people who need to build XFree86 on platforms where the dependencies aren’t all pre-packaged and ready to use like they are on Linux or *BSD. It saves them from having to spend hours hunting down recent versions of libraries foo, bar and baz, everything they need is all there in the tarball so they can get building immediately.
Users who never build X are unaffected either way.
> If you’re worried about bloat, download XFree86 via cvs and
> don’t bother downloading the libraries you don’t need.
> Simple as that. I’m pretty sure that’s what most of the
> Linux distro packagers do.
And that’s the issue. These libraries come bundeled inside of XFree CVS (which I’m using) try to rip it out
nothig that you can leave out. That’s the whole point.
I totally agree with Eugenia this time.
When i read post where someone says “they should code only that and leave that because..” i want to grab some wood and hit author in the head, because i hate nazis and similar. You think they’re good for one project but if other project needs the same code they’re not anymore??? Those devs write a code, and contribute it, project accepted it. If/When Your beloved coders from KDE would write some code for XF it can be accepted too. It’s just a code, not some stupid ideology.
Who are You to say ppl “code that, but not that”? Write Your own code and contribute instead.
Because guys like You we have ethnic and religion wars all the time… “He’s buddist, we can’t let him sell bread here! We’ll starve until we’ll make our own bread, but we’ll not eat buddist bread!” ;P World would be better place without Your unproductive (and counterproductive) thoughts.
Hi, does anyone know where I can find the file called ‘extract’ or ‘extract.exe.’ The geniuses who coded an enormous package like Xfree86 and wrote a script like Xinstall.sh obviously forgot to include it in the package itself. I tried googling for it, but only came with umpteen number of Xfree86 installation guides, but no mention of where I could get the damn file. Thanks in advance for your help!
Did you hack on XFree? Have you hacked on KDE or GNOME?
I don’t think you have.
So please BE QUIET. If the XFree developers want to use those libs then go troll the Xpert list, not here.
Jesus christ. Anybody would think the world was ending.
> Did you hack on XFree? Have you hacked on KDE or GNOME?
> I don’t think you have.
Actually yes I did. Worked on Balsa for a long time, provided patches to GNOME in general, contributed to GALEON in it’s starting phase, wrote CVSGnome and Atlantis (native GNOME Webbrowser). Last named are my own projects started form scratch.
http://mirrors.egwn.net/cvsgnome/
http://www.gnome.org/~chrisime/random/ui/ (scroll down to the last picture for a screenshot of Atlantis)
wow nice flame war where’s my fire proof underwear?
lookin forward to messing around with 4.3
I think there is a simple (bad) reason for the “X is turning into Gnome” comments.
That is that the people who flamed RH over RH8 are trying pitifully to find some justification for there previous comments.
This is because the main changes were modififying KDE/QT to work with the needed changes in this release (XFT2, fontconfig etc).
Quite sad really
(@Eugenia: wow, I am in total agrrement with you- first time for everything-learn something new everyday)
I have read all the posts in this forum. I have looked at the arguments presented here. I have no doubts as to the credentials of someof those posting here- I do not wish to call the right of people to pose their opinions in question. Yet I wonder if these people are aware of what it is that they are actaully arguing for.
Each of the libraries benefit all users of all desktop environments and window managers. These are additions to XFree86 and as such are available to all applications which use XFree86.
pkgconfig is a simple small program which makes it simple to keep track of which versions of which libraries are installed. This helps every developer and every person who wishes to compile from source locally. This simple system is far superior to having to hack your own makefiles and export lots of environment variables and modifying the PATH in order that programs can find their dependent libraries at build time.
The only difficulties I have ever encountered with pkgconfig are a) I have to make sure when I compile source locally that the generated pkgconfig files are store in the correct directories(ie. I use gentoo- so my pkgconfig files are located in /usr/lib/pkgconfig and not in /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig- which is the default when using source written for generic/redhat linux. b) sometimes I have had to to fight with pkgconfig files(.pc) because developers wrongly specified certain version requirements that either did not exist or were wrongly numbered…no big deal. The advantages if this system outweigh any supposed increase in complexity- the system makes software administration simpler…
libxml2 is used by tons of different programs- it is highly generic, small and robust- and as such belongs to a standard repetoire of linux libraries. Not having it in XFree86 means that X and its dependencies cannot make use of the functionality which libxml2 provides. Unless you can provide a really good reason why X and it’s dependencies should not have access to this functionality- I see no point in removing it.
As for font rendering: And this is the most important thing to see here: linux has had shitty font support a long time- no other *feature* has been so requested and has recieved so much attention. As of GNOME2 font support took a gian leap forward- based on freetype-2.1x-2.13, xft2, and fontconfig. This technology was first used by redhat 8.0. This font redenering system was the best ever seen in linux. Now a lrage chunk of this font redering system has been moved in XFree86. In effect eliminating ones dependency on GNOME2 in order to have trully great font support. Now should such stuff be included in Xfree86- well think about it- font rendering is important for every single GUI application -thats all DM’s,WM’s and DE’s and all of their programs and programs which run under X.
Now one could say that font rendering is best left up to the individual DE’s and the DM’s and WM’s don’t really need this stuff: well in so doing one says that we need muliple competing font rendering subsystems ie. one for GNOME, another for KDE, perhaps one for enlightenment- and one also says that waimea, fluxbox, xfce etc should not benefit from unviersally availble font rendering subsystems-and of course you are aguing that we so love the complexity of correctly configuring fonts that we wish to increase the already staggering complexity that we already had involved with fonts prior to the development of the freetype2/xft2/fontconfig system.
In a similiar vain Rasterman’s e17 is working on really incredible stuff with his evas2 system-using OpenGl canvasing- allowing for true alpha-blending, lightning fast window redraws and potentially vector-based scalability of GUI elements. Now these developments are great but only apps which use evas2 will benefit from these- which means other DE’s gain little to nothing from these developments and applications which I use with e17 which are not written with evas2 will stand out like a sore thumb next to evas-based applications.
I trully love these developments- but by the time e17 is here- XFree86 may actually have already implemented sopme if not all of these developments(ie. we will probably have alpha-blending support available in Xfree86 prior to the e17 release. If Rastermans work was directed towards further developing the Xfree86 system all GUI application would benfit from these tremendous adantages and Xfree86 would become something which people were excited about as opposed to feeling that X is better than nothing, albeit not much.
Personally I like XFree86 and it has been very sad to see how the number of active XFree86 developers has dwindeled over time- this situation has been horrible- the single most important subsystem under linux upon which every GUI app is dependent has been basically ignored for a long,long time- making the once very advanced X windows system appear antiquated and outdated. Now some folks have finally started to contribute back to Xfree86 – developing it further, increasing that which availbale to GUI programmers- wow this is a positive development- this means mroe people are working on X- we all benefit from this….
As for GNOME vs KDE influence on XFree86- this is a redherring- like has already been mentioned here SuSE has contributed more to Xfree86 than any of the other groups- and they are a) pretty damned commerical b) are the staunchest supporters of KDE-perhaps as much if not more than redhat which supports GNOME. In as far as KDE developers write all of their libs and apps with a dependency on QT their contributions cannot go directly into XFree86 because XFree86 cannot in turn be dependent upon QT- without causing XFree86 itself to fork. GNOME developers code in the same language (C) as XFree86 using standard open-source/free libraries which are not accompanied by the liscencing concerns present when working with QT. And I say this as someone who likes QT and supports KDE.
More should be brought into XFree86 -not less: so much effort is duplicated and wasted when common things desired by all are only implemented within the confined space of one DE. How much work has gone into creating pseudo-transparency-how many apps and DE’s have jerry-rigged their own pseudo-transparency support ? how many hundreds of programming hours wasted ? where would XFree86 be today if that time and energy had been applied where it belongs ? ie. in building up, refining and increasing the funtionality of XFree86…
Huge flamewar there, and it feels that the number of missunderstandings are quite high as well. I’ll try to give my condese little view first;)
1. If XFree statically links to certain (sharable) libraries I do find that questionable. I would suggest a two package system. One without the libraries, one with them. The distro people should be able to add dependancies so that the needed libraries are installed, and the do-it-yourself people just download the other tar-ball and unpack it per normal (unless the manually install the needed libs). Simple, or does someone totally disagree? I mean, why use up more RAM than neccessary? And why should I have to upgrade X if a new release is done of a lib that XFree uses?
2. Whatever the developers do when not working on XFree should be of little consequence. You can start complaining when you pay for the product;)
3. Introducing gnome specific stuff like GTK (which I hate) would be bad, very bad. Adding features is not. Don’t take personal hatred too far.
4. This is OSS, the people doing XFree can do whatever they want, including turning it into a DOOM clone, unless you are the one paying for the development.
There, wasn’t that nice to get rid of that?;)
Now to “X sucks, let’s replace it”.
There are many reasons to keep X, and many reasons to replace it. I am sure most of you have a ton of them, and I am even more sure we couldn’t agree on much there
But do remember that just because someone would want to write a replacement doesn’t make that person evil. What if it turned out to be really really good?
And, something that I really would like to see is a free version of (NOT a copy of please) DisplayPDF/Quartz Extreme. These are excellent ideas (vectors + using the GFX card better) and not a direction I would think that XFree would take (just my guess though). I would like to see a discussion of this.
And Eugenia, if you still have the patient to read this thread, feel free to suggest the above for “sequel”. Would be very nifty indeed.
Taking a look at the documentation, <STRONG>there is still noi documentation on what virtual size limits are.</STRONG> With my current displays and video cards (nVidia models both at home and at work), trial and error shows that virtual sizes larger than 2048×1520 <EM>(not 1536!)</EM> don’t work. I want to go to a new Samsung 240T 1920×1200 flat-panel–but I want to go to “virtual 3072×1800” when I do — <STRONG>and I can’t find <EM>any</EM> documentation to tell me whether this would work</STRONG>.
And a 240T is altogether too expensive to buy on sheer speculation ;-(
Those “X sucks” people is still not present at the time of this writing (Mike Hearn will take care of them :-), but the conspiracy theories are abound here
Instead of discussing about the new XFree86 features, we’re discussing is XF86 is hostage of the GNOME/RedHat team. Oh dear!
As Brent Busby stated…
But this is XFree86, and it’s getting better because of these people.
An advance in XFree86 is an advance for GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Enlightenment, FVWM, TWM, Mozilla…
And infwis…
(@Eugenia: wow, I am in total agrrement with you- first time for everything-learn something new everyday)
I wonder if someone who’s not with Eugenia on this matter is in a good state of mind Anyway…
Back to normal. Xft2/fontconfig/freetype rocks, and it’s great to see that they’re all part of XFree. Xrandr is some years late, but it’s always a welcome addition.
First of all, why do some Gnome developers contribute to XFree?
XFree is written in C, Gnome is written in C, Gnome developers are used to C. KDE is mainly C++, many KDE developers do only C++, you can’t contribute C++ to XFree – so this one is simple…
Then again, if you’re using RH, and use an USB mouse, guess who wrote the USB drivers? This one was contributed by SuSE, so does this mean that RH should rewrite all those modules, to make it a real RH system? What about X86-64 (mainly SuSE)?
X11 is the standard for Unix (-like) OSs, and it’s going to stay that way for a long time, so live with it. XFree has a lot of features YOU probably won’t need, but as long as there is a need for those features, it is importent to implement them. And XFree is not bloated or slow, it’s just feature-rich and hard to code for (more or less).
I find 4.3’s changelog a bit disappointing, but I haven’t been able to test it yet, so I won’t comment the latest revision, but I like XFree and the enormous power it delivers…
Do you even know what you are talking about or are you just trolling? GNOME is doing things the RIGHT WAY, by splitting out a good deal of the code into generic libraries that can be used accross independent applications. I use openssl and libpng in projects that have nothing to do with GNOME.
> And Eugenia, if you still have the patient to read this thread, feel free to suggest the above for “sequel”.
Thanks for the suggestion, but I am not part of the Sequel OS anymore. I left the team recently.
Yes I’m in the position to make comments like this because I know what I’m talking.
No, it’s very clearly that you don’t. Take the look at how many people already have gave the very solid proofs, points and make senses. You are just an ignorant by think “x VS y” too much, peroid.
Whats with these KDE compilers, first they complain redhat neglects KDE. Then they complain redhat fuged KDE. Now they complain, that KDE is some how disadvantaged. Now the GNOME in SUSE and Mandrake, Connective and misc. is not included or is not given the same attention as KDE. The gnome developers contribute not only to GNOME but other projects like XFree, they make the fonts not suck, dynamic screen resize support, render extentions. Now the KDE developers don’t. They just get these nice APIs and use it in KDE to enchance their platform without contributing. These KDE fan boys (no diss for the developers) need to take another look, before they say anything.
Didn’t KDE & GNOME start talking about making their respective DEs interoperable, I could swaer I read a story about this…I know this is slightly off topic but I decided to ask about it anyway seeing as how a bunch of people are arguing about the two main DEs that you hear a lot about?!
Michael Lauzon
Founder & Lead Project Manager
InceptionOS Project
http://www.inceptionos.org/
[email protected]
Linux Newbies get so confused then they see all those code sharing between competing projects and businesses. They start getting defensive, saying, “Don’t infect my GNOME with your KDE code” and begin drawing lines and taking sides, preparing for war. “Where are the NDAs? How is that legal?” But that’s because they think they have a grasp of what this whole Linux thing is. They don’t.
If we all just called it GNU/Linux from the beginning then they’d start out confused and the strange behavior of the software and community would only strengthen the definition of GNU/Linux, or what it means to be a part of a Free Software Project. This ain’t Open Source, kiddies.
In the future I suspect both KDE and GNOME will integrate into a seamless desktop that could possibly include pieces of Enlightenment, OpenOffice, Mozilla, Mono, XFree, VNC, DirectFB, GStreamer, Ogg, Xvid, etc. All while maintaining its dynamic modularity that allows for things like XFree to run on OSX, Linux and Windows, soon in root window mode. With Free Software anything is possible because everyone has a right to do it.
This is not true of some Open Source or any Shared Source / Closed Source projects, XFree86 being one of the main examples of an exceptional Open Source project. Microsoft Win98 being a bad example.
Its all in the license. And, no, its not about money.
Please excuse me but in what world do we live, if we are not allowed to express our opinions as is ? We have all different opinions which makes us individuals. Open Source doesn’t mean that we have to agree to everything and anything. Ever heard of Open Speech ? Most of the people replied to me here didn’t take the time reading the comments I gave till end. They sometimes cut the context out of nowhere without even understanding the points. Years ago when I started with Linux XFree86 was around 25 MB of Tarred up size and today it easily bombs out the 50 MB limit. 50 MB because it collects all the libraries and includes them in their own repository while they can easily be downloaded on demand and installed on demand. It’s my good right to say that I fear the idea that XFree86 is inheriting GNOME code and it’s also my good right to have a conversation with the people outside to ask what THEY think about it that stuff is being pushed inside XFree86 which makes it adds stuff usually found in the GNOME world. And I like to do this without feeling ashamed because I have asked for it and I like to do this without pushing my head against the wall just for the fact THAT I ASKED. You know things usually start silently. First it starts with the one library and program and then things take over with other programs as well.
Thanks
Please excuse me but in what world do we live, if we are not allowed to express our opinions as is ?
Express your opinions or express your complains?
We have all different opinions which makes us individuals.
pkgconfig, libxml2 and etc are not Gnome, but made from Gnome folks that they created some very useful libraries. My thought, this isn’t an option for you to think that they are Gnome. That’s your ignorant problems. So, is that an option or a fact?
Open Source doesn’t mean that we have to agree to everything and anything.
Of course, but you have to agree that libxml, pkgconfig and etc are not Gnome.
Years ago when I started with Linux XFree86 was around 25 MB of Tarred up size and today it easily bombs out the 50 MB limit. 50 MB because it collects all the libraries and includes them in their own repository while they can easily be downloaded on demand and installed on demand.
Why don’t you do the math on KDE, Gnome, Java, GCC, OpenOffice.org, Linux, Windows and many projects, how much much they have grown the sizes too?
It’s my good right to say that I fear the idea that XFree86 is inheriting GNOME code and it’s also my good right to have a conversation with the people outside to ask what THEY think about it that stuff is being pushed inside XFree86 which makes it adds stuff usually found in the GNOME world.
XFree86 will never add Gnome’s stuff, but will add the useful libraries that were created by Gnome folks. Most of KDE stuff are depending on QT and most of them are written in C++. That count to QT’s license too. Can you show me what’s KDE’s useful libraries that aren’t depend on QT or not written in C++?
You are messing up a lot of facts here. No let me correct this, you are messing up everything here. What you call complaints are in reality opinions. Even if it’s a complaint, who cares ? Fact is that GNOME-XML as the name says was meant to be a GNOME XML library but then as we both agree with being used by other projects as well. I have no problems with that. Same goes for PKGCONFIG written for the intent to be used in GNOME (and as Eugenia would say it’s also meant to be used by KDE, whis it is NOT). I have no problems with that one either. But why stuff it into XFree86 ? That’s my problem. Listen, it’s obviously that you haven’t read the entire thread and all my comments here otherwise you would have realized already that I have nothing against these libraries. That’s what I have stated more than one time now within this Thread. Yes I still belive that these libraries are primarily made by and for GNOME. You weren’t even able to write one sentence about these libraries without even using the word GNOME inside. Specially funny sentence constructions like ‘GNOME-XML and PKGCONFIG are NO GNOME libraries but written by GNOME developers’. Ok let’s say they are NO GNOME libraries but you can’t reject the fact that the GNOME developers wrote these libraries to have their plattform GNOME better supported that way. It’s like the IRAQ war. They like to remove Saddam Hussain but talk about OIL all the time. As we people are stupid enough to not realize that everything is about OIL ? Well this example isn’t the best but it’s an example. Specially for you again. I have nothing against GNOME or KDE (I use both and I more or less like both Desktops). I on my own develop GNOME applications and use gnome-xml and pkgconfig myself (because that is the common suggested way to do things in the GNOME community). And I also know that gnome-xml is a cool library doing for xml related things. I dislike it when people try to interpret things inside my writings that I have never said. I don’t compare KDE or GNOME or OpenOffice here. I’m only talking about XFree86 here nothing else. I’m curious about the GNOME stuff which went inside XFree86 and I’m curious why XFree86 is including all libraries and compile them statically while it may be better to have these libraries be separate.
> > And Eugenia, if you still have the patient to read this thread, feel free to suggest the above for “sequel”.
>
> Thanks for the suggestion, but I am not part of the Sequel OS anymore. I left the team recently.
I thought that one of your friends were involved in sequel. I was just hoping you could mention it. I’m not one of those that somehow hate you because you posted something about sequel and gave them some GUI advice.
With RH beta (Phoebe) I was unable to get these going (they compiled and installed, but would not run GLX). Phoebe was using a 4.3 prerelease. What is the status? I have read that they work, and have read they don’t. Of course people have trouble many times (Some have had trouble on RH 8.0, I have not)
Thanks for any info.
Ok I’ve been following this thread with some interest. I might as well add my view. Seems to me that the XFree86 people decided they needed/wanted to use XML for something or other and they felt the best library for the job was libxml. Great, these people also must have decided they wanted to use pkgconfig. Ooook, well if they’re the ones doing the actual work, don’t you think it’s their choice to use the tools they feel will get the work done fastest and most reliably? You mention that you think that libxml should be removable, but this would imply that you want a split in XFree86. You want one version of XFree that has robust XML abilities and you want another that you can link your own XML library to. If this happened then there would be no assurance of what xml library you’re running and developers would use only the libs that are available on all copies of XF86 (eg: All the sucky stuff, none of the cool new stuff) cause they wouldn’t know if it would work on all systems otherwise. I don’t fully get why you would want this. It’s statically built so that you have no further deps, which makes it easier to install, and you don’t need gnome to use it, everyone wins right? What xml engine would you suggest and why would you want that over the one that the people who did the actual work chose? I really havn’t been able to comprehend what you’re trying to say and I did read all your posts.
As far as i remember this is really caused by redhats driver, and not their version of X. They backported some stuff from 2.5 into their 2.4.20.
Go look at the nvidia forum. (it is linked to somewhere on nvidias linux driver pages)