Hank Marquardt wrote: > > you should _really_ ask yourself why you are going to X4.3: unless > > it has better support (or in my case... the only support of my > > card), there really isn't much benefit in the upgrade. > Well, I've had this darned Radeon 8500DV for over a year now without > really being able to use it as intended. I remember at the time > saying"Oh, support is in the 4.3 tree and that will be released soon, > it should filter into unstable a few weeks later at most" ... yeah, > that worked out well.
as far as i gathered, it seemed that the reason why XFree86-4.3 was taking so long to get into unstable was that there were so many security related issues with it; like you, i am only using experimental for driver support (also a radeon). i've had no problems at all with it and my 3D acceleration is working great. the vanilla 2.6 kernel modules work as well... when i was using LFS, it was a pain using XFree86-4.3 with the 2.4 kernel as you needed to use the modules which came with XFree86, and not the vanilla ones. > Honestly this whole experience (waiting a year and now still having > what seems a kludgy solution) has left a sour taste that has resulted > in gentoo and fedora living on a spare box. I'm not ready to jump > ship, but honestly this theology of "it has to work on all > architectures" is annoying with stuff like this. "experimental" has been there the whole time... i personally find adding a single line into my apt sources list a WHOLE lot easier than a switch to another distro. using the "experimental" branch is not a kludgy solution at all... it is essentially the same as what fedora and gentoo are doing... they are just not as careful in what they label "stable". what i mean is, you will essentially be using the same version of XFree86-4.3 on any distro. i personally found the upgrade to be trivial... and it only took me about 15 minutes (downloading included) when i found out that experimental existed! The X config file needed no editing to do what i wanted. > Enough ranting and back to topic ... I didn't count them, but it seems > I've only got 25 or so X related packages ... I started down the road > I saw in another message of getting the > debian/pool/X/xfree/*pre5v1_i386* packages and installing them all but > that is a whole lot more, including a bunch of debug builds that are > enormous. here i what i installed to get a fully working XFree86-4.3 install, with -dev support. libxaw7/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 xlibs-static-dev/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxv-dev/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxp-dev/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libx11-6/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxt6/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 pm-dev/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxrandr-dev/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 xfonts-scalable/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 xlibs-data/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxmu6/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxv1/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxpm-dev/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxi-dev/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxp6/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxft1/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 xserver-xfree86/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 xutils/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libice6/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 xfree86-common/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxtst6/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 x-window-system-core/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libsm-dev/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxt-dev/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxmuu-dev/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 xlibmesa-dri/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 xlibmesa-glu/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 xterm/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxtrap-dev/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libdps1/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 xlibs-dev/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libsm6/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxtst-dev/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 xlibmesa-gl/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxi6/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 xlibs/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxext6/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxtrap6/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxpm4/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxmuu1/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxrandr2/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 x-dev/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxmu-dev/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 xfonts-base/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 xlibmesa-gl-dev/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libx11-dev/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 xfonts-75dpi/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 xfonts-100dpi/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 xserver-common/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libxext-dev/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 twm/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 xbase-clients/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 libice-dev/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 xlibmesa-glu-dev/experimental uptodate 4.3.0-0pre1v5 i think a few of the meta-packages selected everything... so you don't need to go and select everything manually. but, as i said before, you will need to select xlibmesa instead of the one with a 3 appended. otherwise, you will have a load of broken packages. use aptitude, its your friend :-) > I'll watch the thread here for a while and see what pops up ... having > the experimental line in the conf isn't hurting anything. as long as you don't make it a habit of using experimental for everything ;-) cheers, Sam -- Free High School Science Texts http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/fhsst Sam's Homepages http://fommil.homeunix.org/~samuel http://www.ma.hw.ac.uk/~samuel
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