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Perspectives
October 26, 2005
Xorg 6.9 & 7.0 Release Candidate 1
I meant to blog about this earlier but have been busy lately, so I'm going to cheat and copy from the post I sent to the OpenSolaris X Window System community mailing list last week.
Xorg 6.9 & 7.0 Release Candidate 1 has been released by the X.Org Foundation. The announcement and pointers to sources can be found at:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2005-October/010668.html
Highlights of changes in this release are found at:
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/ChangesSince68
Detailed change logs for those who want gory levels of detail can be found at:
http://cvs.freedesktop.org/xorg/xc/ChangeLog?rev=1.1448&view=markup
Particularly interesting things to test on Solaris include:
- Changing keyboard driver from deprecated "keyboard" to new "kbd" (newly supported on Solaris in this release - shouldn't result in any really noticable functionality changes)
- Audio Bell - in InputDevice section for your keyboard in xorg.conf, add:
Option "BellDevice" "/dev/audio" - The new EXA acceleration architecture for some chipsets from ATI, SiS, and XGI - see http://wiki.x.org/wiki/ExaStatus for details. (At least on the ATI Radeons in the Ferrari's it seems to make the torture test of rolling the mouse over the different areas on the right side of the top section on the www.sun.com home page a little smoother at updating the big picture, though that may be my imagination since I don't have a good benchmark to measure it with.)
Also, while I've been regularly building both the 6.9/imake-based and 7.0/autoconf-based trees on Solaris 10 on SPARC and x86, those who want to run on older OS releases may want to check to make sure everything still builds and runs well on them.
I've integrated it with our Solaris Xorg sources, and made test packages available inside Sun, but unfortunately can't release on opensolaris.org right now - if all goes well, they should be integrated into an upcoming Nevada build and distributed via Solaris Express.
These will also form the basis of our initial X source release via OpenSolaris, which is still planned for later this quarter.