Xorg fresh install...

[XiaoKJ]

As of xfree 4.4 RC2, xfree had officially changed its license to a more "microsoftish" one and thus angered the linux community. Many distros began to use xorg instead of xfree, which are very similar.

I hope we can make this a sticky for people who want to install xorg instead of xfree:D

Lets start for a new gentoo installation,
Just emerge xorg-x11
emerge xorgconfigand you are almost done -- run xorgconfig instead of xf86config

Theres xorgcfg also -- replacing xf86cfg

For gentoo users with xfree,
emerge -c xfree
emerge xorg-x11
open-gl update

you may also want to reemerge nvidia drivers as it is known to be problematic. The fonts are going to be less as nice and there are symlink problems.

I hope instructions for other distros will also be added:D

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by XiaoKJ
As of xfree 4.4 RC2, xfree had officially changed its license to a more "microsoftish" one It's "Microsoftish" to ask that distributors ensure that they don't claim they wrote the software?

That seems a bit, well, stupid, to me.

Anyway, the instructions for LFS are pretty much exactly the same as the instructions for XFree86 on LFS. See http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/cvs/x/xorg.html for some commentary (I especially like the "for someone building a package for their own use, these issues are not significant" comment; it's 100% correct) and instructions.

Those instructions are pretty LFS-centric, though. You might be able to adapt them to be able to compile Xorg on any distro, but it'd take some doing.

[XiaoKJ]

I ran out of adjectives to discribe the matter, thus I used microsoftish...

It isn't microsoftish, but I is no longer under GPL or something.... I don't care... Its no longer for the wonderful linux community....

Any other distro that can do it without compiling?

[bwkaz]

XFree86 never was GPL'ed. IIRC, it was the MIT license without the advertisement clause ("You must say that we wrote it, not you") that makes that license supposedly not compatible with the GPL. The GPL says you have to be able to distribute source without restrictions, and the advertisement clause is a restriction -- one that's extremely simple to satisfy, but apparently that's not the point.

Basically, the XFree86 people added the advertisement clause back in.

Like I said, it doesn't affect end users in the least, which is why BLFS has instructions for both still. But it does affect distributors, which is why most of them have been moving over to Xorg. There's also the commitment at Xorg to get more releases out with more features in them, which is never a bad thing, but right now, both systems are pretty much the same.

[XiaoKJ]

Ohh! thanks!:D

BTW, why ain't people switching over to Y or fresco? heard that they are technically and theortically better than X....:confused:

[bwkaz]

Because Xorg is still X11R6, and as such, will still work with all the software people have (e.g., games from Loki, Id, etc. that are not open source, and other closed source X programs).

(And Y has only released version 0.2 -- a supposedly inferior product is better than a project that's better, but so new that it isn't even at 1.0 yet, let alone 0.9 -- and Fresco seems to be about at version 0.2 plus some changes, so it's not much further along.)