Hi, I am fiddleing with X currently. It's an insane package, but with my new computer it only takes a couple of hours to compile on the Hurd even.
(And the Hurd does cope! Although the number of threads and ports in the root fs server grows without bounds over time... until it eventually crashes if you are unlucky. This does not seem to happen if I reboot after Makefiles and dependencies are generated) Back to X. If you want to compile it yourself, get xfree86-1_3.3.6-10 form any Debian mirror, and see the bug reports: http://bugs.debian.org/72135 http://bugs.debian.org/72041 You also need the kbd and mouse translator to run it, which you can find in some of the contrib dirs on alpha, I think. Follow the instructions posted elsewhere. The bug reports contain some patches, and some further instructions, which you shouldn't ignore. After make World stopped[1], you can and should continue the build by doing "make" in the subdirs lib, nls, programs (to avoid rebuilding everything over and over again). Of course fix the reason for the failure first. After you have build everything, you can make debs by "touch debian/stampdir/build-libc" and dpkg-buildpackage -b -nc. So far, so good. Oh. Build-dependencies: zlib1g-dev, tcl/tk8.2 (I think this is not yet available, but 8.0 is. You can change build-tree/xc/programs/Xserver/XF86Setup/Imakefile to use it), and some other stuff (check debian/control). Now to the problems: The server starts up, although it can't open the unix socket for communication, so no clients can connect. Fixing this in lib/xtrans/ is a priority of course. Note that the old X didn't even have unix socket support compiled in (maybe because it doesn't work :). I tried to disable unix socket support[2], but to be honest, going over tcp is awfully slow and had connection problems, too. So I think fixing the unix domain socket support is the better solution to attack this problem. As soon as I got unix domain socket support working, I am happy to upload packages to alpha.gnu.org. Bya dding streamdev to the hurd package, we can get a working mouse device (I think. The output of streamdev mouse is in a strange format, maybe we can fix this in gnumach). What is not working for me is the keyboard driver kbd, or the translation by X. I get lots of strange and wrong characters when typing in an xterm. People who were interested in working on X, but didn't know where to start, should have sufficient information now. Thanks, Marcus [1] X has make -k by default, so you should keep a log to see the errors, or disable this. [2] See xc/config/cf/gnu.cf, ConnectionFlags -- `Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org Check Key server Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org for public PGP Key [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP Key ID 36E7CD09 http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/Marcus.Brinkmann/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
