Re: XFree, an on-going story (plus a newbie question)
Hello,
I'm the new X 3.3.6 maint (No, no upload yet. Wichert is looking at some
dpkg-shlibdeps evilness that is breaking the build.), and also trying to
get a HURD installation up on my workstation. (more on that later)
Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am fiddleing with X currently. It's an insane package, but with my new
Indeed
> computer it only takes a couple of hours to compile on the Hurd even.
>
> (And the Hurd does cope! Although the number of threads and ports in the
> root fs server grows without bounds over time... until it eventually crashes
> if you are unlucky. This does not seem to happen if I reboot after Makefiles
> and dependencies are generated)
>
> Back to X. If you want to compile it yourself, get xfree86-1_3.3.6-10 form
> any Debian mirror, and see the bug reports:
>
> http://bugs.debian.org/72135
> http://bugs.debian.org/72041
I'll look into getting these patches into woody X 3.3.6. (but see the ps.)
As far as submitting upstream, it seems there is little interest in 3.3.6
development there atm. We'll see..
Until I've uploaded 3.3.6-11, you might consider CCing me on bug reports.
(I'm not going to make everybody upgrade X, just to do a maint change.)
> You also need the kbd and mouse translator to run it, which you can find in
> some of the contrib dirs on alpha, I think. Follow the instructions posted
> elsewhere.
>
> The bug reports contain some patches, and some further instructions, which
> you shouldn't ignore. After make World stopped[1], you can and should continue
> the build by doing "make" in the subdirs lib, nls, programs (to avoid
> rebuilding everything over and over again). Of course fix the reason for the
> failure first.
>
> After you have build everything, you can make debs by "touch
> debian/stampdir/build-libc" and dpkg-buildpackage -b -nc.
>
> So far, so good. Oh. Build-dependencies: zlib1g-dev, tcl/tk8.2 (I think this
> is not yet available, but 8.0 is. You can change
> build-tree/xc/programs/Xserver/XF86Setup/Imakefile to use it), and some
> other stuff (check debian/control).
>
> Now to the problems: The server starts up, although it can't open the unix
> socket for communication, so no clients can connect. Fixing this in
> lib/xtrans/ is a priority of course. Note that the old X didn't even have
> unix socket support compiled in (maybe because it doesn't work :).
> I tried to disable unix socket support[2], but to be honest, going over tcp is
> awfully slow and had connection problems, too. So I think fixing the unix
> domain socket support is the better solution to attack this problem.
Agreed.
> As soon as I got unix domain socket support working, I am happy to upload
> packages to alpha.gnu.org. Bya dding streamdev to the hurd package, we can
> get a working mouse device (I think. The output of streamdev mouse is in a
> strange format, maybe we can fix this in gnumach). What is not working for
> me is the keyboard driver kbd, or the translation by X. I get lots of
> strange and wrong characters when typing in an xterm.
>
> People who were interested in working on X, but didn't know where to start,
> should have sufficient information now.
Actually, my problem is getting HURD booting atm. Using the tarball install,
and following the easy guide instructions verbatim (I'm using /dev/hdb1,
just as in the guide), gnumach seems to boot fine, but hangs immediately
after "FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077".
I thought that perhaps the problem was that eth0 and USB0/1 share an IRQ,
but I get the same problem after disabling USB in the BIOS.
Input/advice appreciated.
Regards,
Steve (HURD newbie)
ps: XFree86-1 (3.3.6) will soon be gutted. It will only provide support
for hardware not supported by X4, and for libc5 compatibility. I'm
also in the process of pruning the upstream source tree, to remove the
code that will no longer be used. The potato package won't be subject
to this, of course. Will this sabotage the HURD effort?
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