First Experiences with X.org's X11 Server?

Slashdot Reader CanadianCrackPot decided to be adventurous and went and installed the latest offering from X.org's X-Server project. Below, you'll find "the basics" of his "first attempt to install [their] X Window Server on a system with a 450 MHz PIII, and Diamond Viper V770 (TNT2 chipset) graphics card, running Mandrake 10.0 Official (FTP download of everything but the RPMS.cooker dir)." To make a long story short, while he did have some luck with installing it, running it was...problematic. He asks: "I'm just wondering how other Slashdot readers are doing with the new X11R6 server, and more importantly, how did you install it?"

"I decided to try installing X.org's X Server today while I had nothing to do here's the results:

• get a test bed system: check
• get sources: check
• ./configure: N/A...I'm worried
• make World: check
• make install; make install.man: check
• startx: crash
• xf86config: check
• startx, again: check -- now I need a manager
• startgnome: galeon not found (crash)
• startkde: crash"

If you've had any luck getting X.org's X-server running on your machine, what hurdles did you have to overcome before it worked?

i'm not sure

[Siniset]

but isn't it no longer xfree86.conf by rather xorg.conf or something like that? Just a thought, not sure if the submitter wrote xfree86conf by accident...maybe that's the problem? Also, Mandrake now has rpm's of it (didn't that get posted today, btw?), maybe you should try installing the rpms?

Sounds like its working to me.

[mcowger]

From you checklist there soudns like you got the xserver running just fine...gnome & kde are completely separate, and may need to be relinked?

xorg fork

[OmniVector]

x.org's x11 server was simply one of the xfree 4.4 release candidates before the license change, with some patches to bring back up to the 4.4 release. it should be almost absolutely identical to installing xfree86. i'm not sure why this even needed to be posted. there is pretty much no difference to install/configure than xfree 4.4

Try another distro please

[Maljin Jolt]

I am afraid Mandrake is not the best distro to experimentally mess with core components. Too many things are tweaked a Mic^H^Handrakesoft's way, the desktops certainly are. It is not easy to rebuild even XFree86 to keep up with those tweaks, so your problems with X.org actually says nothing. And yes, I used to rebuild an XFree86 on Mandrake.

Some other distros, a Slackware for example, use much pure way to build it's own packages which makes them better tool for this kind of experiments.

Re:Slack-current xorg packages worked

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you people compiling from scratch? That's so old fashined. just install the RPM's and get back to work.

Re:Sounds like its working to me.

[Curtman]

Mine were linked against XFree 4.3.0, and work fine with Xorg.

Re:doing it on debian

[Curtman]

That performance is probably just due to you recompiling it, rather than using the 386 optimized binaries from sid.

Fedora Core 2

[Etyenne]

Install Fedora Core 2, and be done with it.

Re:Works fine for me

[13Echo]

Same here. I've used it for about 2 months now with 3 graphics cards; Rage 128 with opensource drivers, Radeon 9500 PRO with ATI's drivers, and an nVidia GeForce FX 5900 XT with nVidia's drivers. All have worked well.

XV overlay support is broken in X.org at the moment (as well as XF86 4.4, to my knowledge). There will be occasional problems with DRI based cards, and nVidia cards will exhibit a blue display when you play your first movie after a reboot.

Don't do that if you don't know what you're doing

[Anonymous Coward]

Why install from source if you don't really know what you're doing? Let your distribution take care of everything for you,