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[20051222]
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Quo vadis, X11?
The news yesterday was from the X consortium that they have
released X11R7,
which moves away from a "monolithic" system using Imake into
a more modularized one using autoconf etc. - Definitely bears
some fingerprint of a GNU generation, which is also reflected
by the list of supported platforms: while previous X releases
supported a wide range of commercial and free Unix systems,
X11R7 only lists Linux and Solaris as supported at this time.
As the XFree distribution (a spinoff of MIT's X == X.org from
many years ago) is likely being superseded by the newer X.org
releases, the question about NetBSD switching to X.org or not
is one coming up on and off. As an answer, NetBSD core member
Valeriy 'uwe' E. Ushakov has given an
outline of NetBSD's plans regarding XFree86 vs. X.org.
If someone wants to help merging patches and feeding them
upstream, feel free to do so! :)
For those that want to use X.org today, they can find it in
pkgsrc/meta-pkgs/xorg.
Maybe let me express my personal concerns that X(.org) is moving
towards a Linux-centric system with no backward compatibility for
systems not running Linux and all the fancy PC-centric,
nVidia-equipped hardware and software. Which would not be
the system that we all used to use for the past XX years.
[Tags: x11]
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