Add information about the work in progress to bring in the X packages

(server, client, libraries) from freedesktop.org.

Once the website has next been updated, please feel free to post the
following URL in response to the questions about it:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/x.html#WHICH-X

Discussed on:	freebsd-doc, freebsd-x11
This commit is contained in:
Mark Linimon 2004-06-08 08:35:38 +00:00
parent c3925a309d
commit 067217351c
Notes: svn2git 2020-12-08 03:00:23 +00:00
svn path=/head/; revision=21121

View file

@ -7001,6 +7001,86 @@ options SYSVMSG # enable for messaging</programlisting>
<title>The X Window System and Virtual Consoles</title>
<qandaset>
<qandaentry>
<question id="whatis-X">
<para>What is the X Window System?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>The X Window System is the most popular windowing system
capable of running on UNIX or UNIX-like systems, including
&os;. <ulink url= "http://www.x.org">X.org</ulink> administers
the <ulink url="http://www.x.org/X11_protocol.html">X protocol
standards</ulink>. The current release of the specification
is 11.6, so you will often see references shortened to
<literal>X11R6</literal> or even just <literal>X11</literal>.
</para>
<para>Many implementations are available for different
architectures and operating systems. For instance, an
implementation of the server-side code is properly known
as an <literal>X server</literal>.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question id="which-X">
<para>Which X servers are available for &os;?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>In the past, if you wanted to run X on &os;, you were
basically restricted to running an X implementation called
<literal>XFree86</literal>&trade; which is maintained by
<ulink url="http://www.xfree86.org">The XFree86 Project,
Inc.</ulink> This software was installed by default on
&os; versions up until 4.10 and 5.2. Although X.org
itself maintained an implementation during that time
period, it was basically only provided as a reference
platform, as it had suffered greatly from bitrot over
the years.</para>
<para>However, early in 2004, the XFree86 Project split
over issues including the pace of code changes, future
directions, and a licensing change. X.org updated its
source tree to the last XFree86 release before the
licensing change (XFree86 version 4.3.99.903), incorporated
many changes that had previously been maintained separately,
and has released that software as X11R6.7.0. A separate but
related project, <ulink url="http://www.freedesktop.org">
freedesktop.org</ulink> (or <literal>fd.o</literal> for short),
is working on rearchitecting the original XFree86 code to
reflect modern graphics card technology (with the goal of
greatly increased performance) and modern software practices
(with the goal of incresed maintainability, and thus faster
releases as well as easier configuration). X.org intends to
incorporate the fd.o changes in its future releases.</para>
<para>The current technology roadmap for &os; includes
replacing XFree86 with fd.o as the default server sometime
later in 2004 under the assumption that the pace of its
development will more closely match that of &os; itself.
The XFree86 ports
(<filename role="package">x11/XFree86-4</filename> and
subports) will remain in the ports collection and be supported
as developer interest permits. Note that it is not currently
possible to mix-and-match pieces of each implementation;
work is under way to correct this problem.</para>
<note>
<para>The following paragraphs refer to the existing
XFree86 implementation, but most should also be applicable
to the fd.o implementation as well. While the default
configuration filename for the fd.o implementation is
<filename>xorg.conf</filename>, it will search for
<filename>XF86Config</filename> if it cannot find it.</para>
</note>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question id="running-X">
<para>I want to run X, how do I go about it?</para>