From nisha at lantana.tenet.res.in Fri Apr 15 10:48:32 2005 From: nisha at lantana.tenet.res.in (Nisha P Kurur) Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2005 16:18:32 +0530 (IST) Subject: Regarding resolution Message-ID: Greetings!!! I'm currently using a Redhat 9 system with the following specifications Monitor - HMC 582 Video card - Intel i810 I'm able to configure X but when i decrease the resolution browser ( mozilla ) gives a weird colour. So i set the default depth to 24 which was not supported. When the default depth was set to 16 it worked fine but with huge windows ( not the actual resolution ). What can be done regarding this??? I don't want installing Fedora core 2 as the solution. Regards Nisha From mharris at www.linux.org.uk Fri Apr 22 12:34:40 2005 From: mharris at www.linux.org.uk (Mike A. Harris) Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2005 08:34:40 -0400 Subject: Regarding resolution In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4268EF60.6070005@www.linux.org.uk> Nisha P Kurur wrote: > > Greetings!!! > > I'm currently using a Redhat 9 system with the following specifications > > Monitor - HMC 582 > Video card - Intel i810 > > I'm able to configure X but when i decrease the resolution browser ( > mozilla ) gives a weird colour. So i set the default depth to 24 which > was not supported. When the default depth was set to 16 it worked fine > but with huge windows ( not the actual resolution ). > > What can be done regarding this??? I don't want installing Fedora core 2 > as the solution. Upgrade to Fedora Core 3. (Both RHL 9 and Fedora Core 2 are no longer supported by Red Hat.) From mharris at redhat.com Mon May 16 19:37:01 2005 From: mharris at redhat.com (Mike A. Harris) Date: Mon, 16 May 2005 15:37:01 -0400 Subject: Administrative notice: xfree86-list@redhat.com mailing list deprecation alert. Message-ID: <4288F65D.90904@redhat.com> This is an administrative notice to the members of the list, that this mailing list is now deprecated and will probably be disabled at some point in the future. The list was initially intended to provide a forum for users of Red Hat Linux to discuss XFree86 related problems without having to join one of the high volume OS specific lists, or the generic redhat-list at redhat.com. It was also intended to enable myself to keep track of XFree86 specific issues easier by monitoring a single lower volume list, than to have to keep track of the large number of high volume per-OS-release mailing lists we used to maintain at Red Hat in the past. In Fedora Core 2, we switched to X.Org X11 from XFree86, and we have now released 2 Fedora Core releases with xorg-x11 as the supported X11 implementation. Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 ships xorg-x11 instead of XFree86. Since our switch to X.Org X11 away from XFree86, the already low volume on this mailing list has dropped quite a bit, which I believe is indicative that while not all people upgrade to each new OS release, the majority of people using our community OS releases have upgraded to FC2 or later already, and seem to participate in the various Fedora mailing lists we provide, as well as the upstream xorg at freedesktop.org mailing list. For a while, I've debated wether or not it would be useful to create a new mailing list named "x-list at redhat.com" or something similarly X11 implementation generic with which to replace this list, however the volume on this list has dropped significantly, and personally, I believe that the list has more or less outlived its usefulness now, and there are superior public forums out there nowadays for discussing XFree86 and Xorg X11 related issues. Everyone might as well just switch to the existing public forums. While this list will remain open for the time being, my plan is to eventually decommission it sometime later this year, so I wanted to give the subscribership a heads up, and provide everyone with a list of alternative mailing lists which are much more suitable, and more likely to yield better answers to questions and technical problems: xorg at freedesktop.org - Primary X.Org user/devel mailing list xfree86 at xfree86.org - Primary XFree86 user mailing list fedora-list at xfree86.org - Primary Fedora Core end user mailing list There are a number of other X.Org related mailing lists which are hosted at lists.x.org which may be useful as well. XFree86.org also hosts a number of other mailing lists related to its project, and Red Hat provides a number of other Fedora Core related end user, tester, and developer mailing lists which can be used to discuss problems specific to using Fedora Core. Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers using RHEL 2.1 or RHEL 3, can contact Red Hat directly for technical support by logging into the Red Hat support website at: http://www.redhat.com/support or by contacting support via telephone at 1-888-RED-HAT1. The above public support mailing lists may also be useful to Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers. I assume nobody here will really have any strong feelings one way or another, as the list has been mostly dead for quite a while now, however feel free to respond back to the list if you have any thoughts about the above plan. Thanks for reading this far. ;o) TTYL From ted at cypress.com Mon May 16 20:07:38 2005 From: ted at cypress.com (Thomas Dodd) Date: Mon, 16 May 2005 15:07:38 -0500 Subject: Administrative notice: xfree86-list@redhat.com mailing list deprecation alert. In-Reply-To: <4288F65D.90904@redhat.com> References: <4288F65D.90904@redhat.com> Message-ID: <4288FD8A.8010906@cypress.com> Mike A. Harris wrote: > Since our switch to X.Org X11 away from XFree86, the already > low volume on this mailing list has dropped quite a bit, which > I believe is indicative that while not all people upgrade to > each new OS release, the majority of people using our community > OS releases have upgraded to FC2 or later already, and seem to > participate in the various Fedora mailing lists we provide, as > well as the upstream xorg at freedesktop.org mailing list. Is the shipping X.Org packages be closer to the upstream versions than the Red Hat XFree86 packages were? If so, the the X.Org list would be more responsive to questions from Fedora/Red Hat uses. X.Org is likly more responsibve that the XF86 lists were when this one was started. Fedora development seams is a bit more public than Red Hat Linux was, back when this list started. > I assume nobody here will really have any strong feelings one > way or another, as the list has been mostly dead for quite a > while now, however feel free to respond back to the list if > you have any thoughts about the above plan. Until/unless Fedora diverges considerably from X.Org sources, you won't see much need for a seperate list. Given that there is no longer a "free" Red Hat product, a public list from Red Hat isn't very useful either. (I would never have asked a Fedora question here) Most of us know how busy you are anyway. Maybe when the next big thing comes along you revive this list, or similar ... :) -Thomas From mharris at www.linux.org.uk Thu May 19 11:04:53 2005 From: mharris at www.linux.org.uk (Mike A. Harris) Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 07:04:53 -0400 Subject: Administrative notice: xfree86-list@redhat.com mailing list deprecation alert. In-Reply-To: <4288FD8A.8010906@cypress.com> References: <4288F65D.90904@redhat.com> <4288FD8A.8010906@cypress.com> Message-ID: <428C72D5.50004@www.linux.org.uk> Thomas Dodd wrote: > Mike A. Harris wrote: > >> Since our switch to X.Org X11 away from XFree86, the already >> low volume on this mailing list has dropped quite a bit, which >> I believe is indicative that while not all people upgrade to >> each new OS release, the majority of people using our community >> OS releases have upgraded to FC2 or later already, and seem to >> participate in the various Fedora mailing lists we provide, as >> well as the upstream xorg at freedesktop.org mailing list. > > > Is the shipping X.Org packages be closer to the upstream versions than > the Red Hat XFree86 packages were? Technically that depends on the given X project. Let me explain what I mean in greater detail. With XFree86, releases were 12-18 months apart, which is an incredibly long time to wait for an upstream X release. People do not want to wait that long for a new X, and then wait another 1-6 months or so for their favourite distro to update to the new X just to get their now 14 month old video card to work. Also, when bugs get fixed, either by the upstream X projects, by Red Hat, by other distributions, or by random developers in the community, a bug fix is a bug fix is a bug fix, and the masses of people out there using our OS, or Debian, or Mandrake, SuSE, or anything else - do not want to be told "you have to wait 16 months until the new release of XFree86 is out, sorry, we wont apply patches because then we're not "stock". People want support for their hardware, and they want it to be stable and reliable. They don't generally care wether the code is 100% stock upstream code, or patched with new driver support and bugfixes. So it really doesn't matter. People use a prebuilt OS distribution because they want to use a working OS, not because they want to reduce the number of patches in use for pedantic reasons of purism. Those who are purists, are of course free to recompile the buggy stock source code themselves, with ancient driver support if they like, and keep all the bugs. ;o) One of the reasons X.Org was re-established, was specifically to solve a number of the problems with other existing open source X implementations at the time. The emphasis has always been to make X.Org not only continue to be an open source project, but to be an "open project" project. One that people can easily get involved with, and are helped - not hindered. To build a community around X11 development, and to nurture and mentor new developers, and encourage people to get involved. Another goal of X.Org, is to follow the "release early, release often" mantra of the open source community. Whereas XFree86 generally released a new release every 12 to 16 months, which more or less forced distributions to apply numerous hardware support and bugfix patches one on top of another, quickly piling up into the hundreds. X.Org has released 4 separate releases of X.Org X11 in the last 12-14 months or so. There was the initial 6.7.0 release, followed by the 6.8.0 release about 6 months or so later, followed by a 6.8.1 release a week or two later, then the 6.8.2 release a few months after that. Work is underway currently to build a 6.8.3 "bugfix stable" release within the next few months (no specific date set yet), and the 6.8.x branch will continue to be maintained at least as long as there are developers or distributions interested in continuing the branch. In parallel, the 6.9(monolithic)/7.0(modular) release is under development, and will be released later this year. The bottom line of all of this, is that patches get both submitted upstream to X.org faster, committed to CVS head faster (for the next major release), reviewed for consideration for the next stable branch release (unlike other well known open source X implementations), and checked into the stable branch, and actually released in a bugfix point release within a few months. This means distros only need to apply patches for a few months, which makes the patch pileup much smaller. Additionally, since it is so much easier to get patches into X.Org, we've established a more or less "defacto" policy of NOT including any patches into our rpms, UNTIL they are submitted by someone to X.Org bugzilla and committed directly into CVS, then nominated for the stable branch. While there are, and always will be some exceptsions to this "defacto" rule we're observing, the net result is that the majority of patches you see in xorg-x11-6.8.2 rpms in FC4, are mostly patches either already committed to Xorg CVS, or are patches in the "nominated for 6.8.3 and likely to be included" queue. So when 6.8.3 is released, and I update the rpms for FC4, we more or less can throw away almost all of the patches we are applying, minus a small few. So far, maintenance of xorg-x11 has been a dream, compared to other X11 implementations from a previous life. ;o) > If so, the the X.Org list would be more responsive to questions from > Fedora/Red Hat uses. There's really no "if" there. The Xorg community is very friendly in general, and very helpful. There is generally no animosity towards any distributions or individuals. You'll find the Xorg community to be very friendly and much more responsive than some other well known projects. Also, X.Org doesn't have a "core team" of elite individuals who reign supreme. There are a number of developers who are long time X contributors, who are on the board of directors or architecture working group, but there is no benevolent dictator(s) in X.Org. It is all very much a community thing, and anyone can get involved tomorrow if they like, dial in on the confcalls, IRC, all mailing lists (they're all public), share opinions, nominate patches, etc. Obtaining CVS write access is a fairly informal process - one just has to get involved, chat with everyone in email/IRC, find something they're interested in working on, and do it. After they submit some code, unless it is really crazy or crappy, they can generally get CVS access right away, or after submitting code a few times. It's more or less very similar to how the GNOME project works. So you wont find animosity towards Fedora/Red Hat users generally speaking. There might be random individuals out there, but I guess that's unavoidable. ;o) > X.Org is likly more responsibve that the XF86 lists were when this one > was started. About 10000 times more. > Fedora development seams is a bit more public than Red Hat Linux was, > back when this list started. Yep. So is X.Org compared to other open source X11 implemenation projects. ;o) >> I assume nobody here will really have any strong feelings one >> way or another, as the list has been mostly dead for quite a >> while now, however feel free to respond back to the list if >> you have any thoughts about the above plan. > > > Until/unless Fedora diverges considerably from X.Org sources, you won't > see much need for a seperate list. Generally speaking, the majority of patches we've ever applied to X (XFree86 or Xorg) have all been things that went into the next X release, or the one after that. We very much dislike carting around lots of patches and maintaining them forever. Unfortunately with 12-18 month release cycles of the previous X implementation, we had no choice in order to meet our users and customer's needs. With X.Org however, while we still apply patches that fix bugs and add /some/ new hardware support (but usually very conservatively), we try to stick to the set of things that are in the 6.8.x approval queue, or which we plan on submitting ourselves to the queue, and have a high degree of confidence they'll be accepted. So our X will never diverge very far from XORG-6_8-branch by nature, although it will predate it by a few weeks/months a bit. This is a good thing though, not a bad thing, because the patches in the approval queue are much more likely to be included if people such as myself are saying "we've shipped this for 3 months now and it fixes the problem and does not seem to regress anything". Short story is: X.Org is more interested in progress of X11 technology, and providing the best implementation of it out there, than getting involved in petty distribution politics, etc. > Given that there is no longer a "free" Red Hat product, a public list > from Red Hat isn't very useful either. (I would never have asked a > Fedora question here) Well, as you allude to, "Fedora Core" is the "free" thing we now provide, only it is called a "Project" rather than a "Product". However in practice, the difference is quite cosmetic and semantical for the most part IMHO. Fedora questions related to Xorg are welcome here, but I definitely would encourage people to use xorg at freedesktop.org or fedora-list at redhat.com instead, as the number of useful replies that would come back would likely be far greater than on this slowly dying list. ;o) > Most of us know how busy you are anyway. Maybe when the next big thing > comes along you revive this list, or similar ... :) ;o) My hope for the last n years, has been to see the X11 developer community come together and unite towards a common goal - working together and encouraging others to do the same, making progress focussing on common interests and ideologies, rather than focusing on differences and politics. It's been a bumpy ride along the way, but finally the reborn X.Org came out of it all, and in the last 16 months everything has magically come together. Major strides are being made now, and the developer community is growing and growing very quickly as more and more people get involved both in X.Org, and in the variety of projects that surround X.org and freedesktop.org. The next "big thing" to come along, will likely be X11R7, slated for later this year. That'll definitely keep me busy for FC5 for sure. By killing this mailing list, I'll have 10-20 more seconds each day to contribute to X.Org development. ;o) Happy trails. TTYL