X.Org packages are now available for Ubuntu Linux. Here the announcement:
Since Ubuntu's public announcement in September, 'does it have X.Org?' has been one of the most frequently-asked questions. Until now, the answer to that was that we were based on XFree86 4.3.0, with some 320,000 lines of patches; however, the answer to that question is now dead simple: Yes!
For the last two weeks, Fabio Massimo Di Nitto and Daniel Stone have been locked in a room together, and we now have packages to show for it. The upgrade from XFree86 to X.Org should be perfectly smooth and seamless, and it is supported across Ubuntu's three architectures: amd64, i386, and powerpc.
This release brings many new features, and hopefully even more hardware support than before. This represents one of the most significant core package updates we have ever tried in Ubuntu, and is the result of weeks of work.
To upgrade, you must be running the Hoary tree[0]; if you simply run a Smart Upgrade in Synaptic, or 'sudo apt-get dist-upgrade', your system should automatically get upgraded to X.Org. The next time you restart GDM (either by running 'sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart', which will kill your active session, or by restarting the machine), you will be running the X.Org X server.
Please bear in mind that this represents the first public release of these packages, and as such there will no doubt be bugs to be found. In particular, people using ATI chipsets may experience X server crashes when the resolution given in the configuration file is incorrect; also, use of Synaptic may cause a very loud error about the locale being unknown. Copy and paste between some GTK1 applications (e.g. emacs) is known to be problematic.
While this release also features the Composite extension, which enables true transparency, Expos-like functionality, etc, this extension is still experimental. As such, it has been disabled by default, and we have respected this default. If you want to enable the Composite extension, add the following to /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
but please be aware that you may experience random crashes, and performance using Composite is still rather sluggish at this stage. This is not an Ubuntu-specific problem: it is an architectural problem with the current X.Org server.
That being said, if you are confident that you can deal with any unexpected breakage that may occur, please upgrade to X.Org and give it all the testing it needs! If you find a bug, please report it through our bug tracking system[1].
Cheers!
Daniel Stone and Fabio Massimo Di Nitto, Ubuntu X maintainers
[0]: See Matt Zimmerman's announcement of hoary:
http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2004-October/000005.html
[1]: http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com
--
Daniel Stone
Since Ubuntu's public announcement in September, 'does it have X.Org?' has been one of the most frequently-asked questions. Until now, the answer to that was that we were based on XFree86 4.3.0, with some 320,000 lines of patches; however, the answer to that question is now dead simple: Yes!
For the last two weeks, Fabio Massimo Di Nitto and Daniel Stone have been locked in a room together, and we now have packages to show for it. The upgrade from XFree86 to X.Org should be perfectly smooth and seamless, and it is supported across Ubuntu's three architectures: amd64, i386, and powerpc.
This release brings many new features, and hopefully even more hardware support than before. This represents one of the most significant core package updates we have ever tried in Ubuntu, and is the result of weeks of work.
To upgrade, you must be running the Hoary tree[0]; if you simply run a Smart Upgrade in Synaptic, or 'sudo apt-get dist-upgrade', your system should automatically get upgraded to X.Org. The next time you restart GDM (either by running 'sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart', which will kill your active session, or by restarting the machine), you will be running the X.Org X server.
Please bear in mind that this represents the first public release of these packages, and as such there will no doubt be bugs to be found. In particular, people using ATI chipsets may experience X server crashes when the resolution given in the configuration file is incorrect; also, use of Synaptic may cause a very loud error about the locale being unknown. Copy and paste between some GTK1 applications (e.g. emacs) is known to be problematic.
While this release also features the Composite extension, which enables true transparency, Expos-like functionality, etc, this extension is still experimental. As such, it has been disabled by default, and we have respected this default. If you want to enable the Composite extension, add the following to /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enabled"
EndSection
but please be aware that you may experience random crashes, and performance using Composite is still rather sluggish at this stage. This is not an Ubuntu-specific problem: it is an architectural problem with the current X.Org server.
That being said, if you are confident that you can deal with any unexpected breakage that may occur, please upgrade to X.Org and give it all the testing it needs! If you find a bug, please report it through our bug tracking system[1].
Cheers!
Daniel Stone and Fabio Massimo Di Nitto, Ubuntu X maintainers
[0]: See Matt Zimmerman's announcement of hoary:
http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2004-October/000005.html
[1]: http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com
--
Daniel Stone
