Re: Xfree86 4.2.XXX
MallarJ@aol.com writes:
> I've recently gotten a new laptop, a Toshiba Satellite Pro 6000 (a
> model that came out early last year). It's got a Trident CyberBlade
> XP Ail graphics adapter.
>
> I've been trying to get X support for it, and have come to the
> following conclusions:
>
> * XFree86 (hereafter referred to as simply X) 4.2.0 appears to
> support the
> card, but only in framebuffer mode.
> * I also hear there is support in non-framebuffer mode, but it's
> unaccellerated.
> * Looking at the XFree86 site, they have just added accelerated support to
> the X 4.2.99 snapshot.
...
> I can install the X 4.2.99 snapshot. My question is, what about
> Debian's dependencies? I plan on installing a large amount of X
> stuff (KDE, OpenOffice, etc.), and I know that those packages are
> going to have dependencies on X software. However, since I'm not
> installing from .deb files, how do I go about doing this?
So there are several parts to X. There's the X server, which actually
talks to the hardware. Then programs like xterm and your window
manager and what not are X clients, and usually use a library called
Xlib to talk to the server.
The simple fact here is that the X protocol hasn't changed in
*years*. Which means that you can do something like install the
snapshot version of X in /usr/local, and run the server out of there.
All of your X-using programs will use the (Debian-provided) Xlib from
XFree86 3.3.6, but that's really just fine, and won't affect anything.
The main thing to do, then, is to repoint the first line of
/etc/X11/Xserver to point to /usr/local/bin/XFree86 or wherever.
(Don't know if they do this for pre-releases, but XFree86 used to put
out binary tarballs of chunks of the system, so you could get a
tarball of just the X server; this was convenient when I actually
wanted to put X on my potato machine, but for lack of hardware support
in XFree86 3.3.6.)
--
David Maze dmaze@debian.org http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: