Subject: Re: [SOMEWHAT OT] XFree (Re: Text boxes in Linux)
From: Pierre Abbat (phma@oltronics.net)
Date: Wed Jan 05 2000 - 17:51:27 CST
On Wed, 05 Jan 2000, Bernhard Rosenkraenzer wrote:
>On Tue, 4 Jan 2000 sterwill@abisource.com wrote:
>
>> I only wish the XFree development cycle was much more open.
>
>I couldn't agree more (same for many others) - actually we're getting so
>fed up with XFree being closed that we're seriously considering a
>completely open fork.
>What are your thoughts on this?
I'm not quite sure what you mean, but here's my experience:
I installed Mandrake 5.3 on a friend's computer which she bought parts for. The
motherboard is an ASUS ATX board with SiS video on board, some model number
which isn't listed in Xconfigurator. The X server wouldn't work at all. We
called up ASUS, they told us to ask SiS. We called SiS, they told us to
download it from the website. I went to the website and it pointed to SuSE,
where I downloaded the RPM and the tarball. The RPM needed some library which
Mandrake doesn't have, so I suppose it's a SuSE RPM. The tarball is a binary
tarball. How can I compile it for the Mandrake setup if I can't get the source?
What's the point of a free OS if I can't get the source for the X server?
A Mandrake 6.* disk is on the way. Maybe that'll have a working X server for
this board. Meanwhile, she got a video board with a different SiS chip, which
is supported, and has a halfway-decent X server.
phma
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