X in FC7

[Kostas Georgiou]

On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 08:03:06PM -0600, Steven Pritchard wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 09:49:06AM -0500, Adam Jackson wrote:
> > Sure, but that doesn't explain why we use it for local font access.
> 
> Old (386/486-era) systems with no FPU would seem to hang for seconds
> at a time while the X server rendered fonts.  Even on systems with an
> FPU, using the font server made X *much* more responsive/smooth.

Another reason was that the XFree86 3.x server did not support truetype
fonts but xfs (with the xfsft patches) did since RH6. It was the same
time that RH switched to using xfs.

You can read everything in a redhat white paper[1] for more details.

Kostas Georgiou

[1] http://www.redhat.net/support/wpapers/redhat/newfontsystem/index.html