On Mon, 2004-05-31 at 21:19, Bill Cunningham wrote: > I have a suggestion for a topic. I would like to know more > about this Xfree86 vs x.org with differences, installation > issues, etc. Is X.org technically superior to XFree86?
Bill, Most of the major Linux and BSD distros are moving away from XFree86 due to licensing issues, but more over because the development of XFree86 ground to a halt. With almost a year between the most recent release, XFree86 was becoming out of date with the rapidly advancing open source world. X.org is based on a pre-release version of XFree86, known as XFree86 4.3.99. The X.org official release is 6.7.0, and promises to integrate Keith Packard's Freedesktop.org project in the next release, which includes some features that will be found in Microsoft's long-delayed "Longhorn" operating system (such as native transparencies). At present, there are only minor differences between X.org's and Xfree86's current release. The differences are so small that installing either one won't generate a huge benefit to you (X.org seems to have fewer bugs, interestly enough. XFree86 has been backporting X.org patches into their 4.5-development tree). X.org is also sponsored by some big-shot companies, such as Sun Microsystems. The downside to this is that when the money from corp sponsors dries out, we'll end up in the same boat as Mozilla.org. That isn't such a bad boat to be in though, if you've installed Mozilla lately. This is open source at work -- a project grows stagnate and full of mindless bureaucracy, so someone else comes along, downloads the source, and hacks out a better version. It happened with the gcc compiler when egcs made a better version, and it'll happen to XFree86/X.org. Mark -- Mark C. Ballew - Free Software advocate, admin, and developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP: 0xB2A33008 http://www.markballew.com AIM: pdx110 _______________________________________________ RLUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
