On Mon, Aug 30, 1999 at 09:45:10PM -0400, Adam Di Carlo wrote: > It occurs to me that there should be a post-installation task to > install and configure X11 if possible. Does anyone think this is > possible in the short term? Difficult to say. Upstream development of xf86config and XF86Setup has halted since 3.3.x is considered a dead path of development. > What is the best way to configure X now? Still xf86setup ? Is that > cross-platform? Is there any possibility to help users determine > which X server to use as well? Well, the X server postinst scripts all call xserver-configure, which is a Bourne shell script that attempts to determine whether X is configured or not, and then asks the user to configure it if it isn't. XF86Setup is legendarily mono-platform. Not so much because of what it's written in (Tcl/Tk), but because of all the assumptions it makes about the underlying hardware. xserver-configure is unfortunately long and ugly since I didn't rewrite it from scratch, but rather hacked on it after I took over the package. > Kinda a tricky issue ... Yes. tausq (Randolph Chung) has a tool which scans the PCI bus looking for video devices, and can tell you what X server package to install based on that. It apparently works for i386 and has seen some success on PowerPC and SPARC as well. m68k will only ever use the FBDev server. Not sure about Alpha. All it has are PCI devices so in theory I suppose it should work perfectly there. I've invited tausq to participate in this list, BTW. I'll pass along some espionage from XFree86. There is some momentum going to get Xconfigurator and/or SaX relicensed under MIT terms for inclusion in XFree86 proper. This is not planned before 4.0, though. But we shouldn't pour TOO much into a solution as it may well be obsoleted by XFree86 4.0. I do think some Debian folks should get involved with either Xconfigurator or SaX hacking if they're allowed to. Both are GPL, so we can use them even if they don't get relicenses. But would be nice to have a tool that doesn't ignore us. -- G. Branden Robinson | Debian GNU/Linux | If encryption is outlawed, only outlaws branden@ecn.purdue.edu | will @goH7OjBd7*dnfk=<q4fDj]Kz?. cartoon.ecn.purdue.edu/~branden/ |
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