Peter Tribble wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 5:04 PM, Alan Coopersmith
> <Alan.Coopersmith at sun.com> wrote:
>> Hillel Lubman wrote:
>>
>>> It's strange that Sun drops support for legacy SPARC graphics
>>> cards, especially when drivers remain closed source.
>> It's largely because they're closed source - if they were open, someone in
>> the community could port them from Xsun to Xorg, but since we can't open the
>> sources, and aren't going to assign the resources to port them, there's no
>> drivers we can ship (hard to make a business case for spending a lot of
>> effort
>> on hardware that's been off the price list for years, and will be near or
>> past
>> the end of support life by the time most customers are ready to move, so
>> there's
>> no sales or service revenue to be made).
>
> If someone had such a machine, and a copy of the Xsun packages and associated
> drivers (perhaps from the last SXCE release), could they install Xsun
> and have that
> work?
Probably, though you'ld have to deal with the Xsun packages replacing the
/usr/openwin -> /usr/X11 symlink (just affects any scripts, etc. with
/usr/openwin/bin/foo hardcoded, since in build 130 all the X libraries &
programs are in the default paths).
I've even offered before to release the Xsun server sources (minus the
encumbered DPS & font libraries) to the community, should the community
wish to maintain it for use with the existing closed source binary drivers,
but no one has been interested enough to follow through.
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
