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http://blogs.sun.com/alanc/date/20050801 Monday August 01, 2005

X11R6.9 & 7.0 Release Candidates Zero

The “zeroth” release candidates of X11R6.9 and 7.0 have been released and are in need of people like you to download them, build them, test them, and report back any problems you find. These are numbered zero because they're not quite to the point of a normal release candidate, but are to the point where we want people to try them, especially the 7.0 builds. As you can guess from the version number, 6.9 is not a major leap from the current 6.8.2, but does bring the usual collection of new features, driver updates, and bug fixes. 7.0 takes the same code and delivers it in a whole new way, breaking the giant X.Org source tree into individual modules for each library, program, and driver module, and building it all via the GNU autoconf, automake, libtool, and pkgconfig tools instead of the classic Imake used in past X.Org releases since the dawn of X11.

So while 6.9 should build on pretty much the same set of platforms as 6.8.2 did, 7.0 started over with a clean slate and may need work to build on many platforms. The current modular developers have worked mainly on recent releases of Linux, Solaris, and BSD on x86 platforms, with some additional work done on other architectures for those OS'es, including AMD64, IA64, and SPARC, plus MacOS X and Cygwin. For instance, I've built all the libraries and applications on Solaris 10 for both SPARC and x86 architectures, and built the Xorg server on Solaris 10/x86. Older releases and other platforms and architectures need to be tested to find out if we need to adjust the autoconf tests for them, and various build time options still need to be converted to autoconf flags, plus lots of documentation needs to be written to explain it all.

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Posted at 11:56PM Aug 01, 2005 by Alan Coopersmith in X11  |  Comments[1]

Comments:

Have you had a chance to test this release with ATI Radeon Xpress 200M chipsets? My laptop has this chipset and the screen gets garbled when I use the radeon driver that comes with build 18 of Solaris Express. I'd be willing to test it if you have a pre-compiled binary that I can drop into my install of solaris express.

Posted by Jason Fiset on August 08, 2005 at 04:18 PM PDT #

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