Interview with freedesktop.org Members (OSNews) [LWN.net]

OSNews interviews the main members of freedesktop.org: founder Havoc Pennington, Keith Packard, Jim Gettys, Waldo Bastian and David Zeuthen. "David Zeuthen: First of all it might be good to give an overview of the direction HAL ("Hardware Abstraction Layer") is going post the 0.1 release since a few key things have changed. One major change is that HAL will not (initially at least, if ever) go into device configuration such as mounting a disk or loading a kernel driver."

(Log in to post comments)

Politics of the X server

Posted Nov 25, 2003 1:20 UTC (Tue) by pjhacnau (subscriber, #4223) [Link]

". . . the new X Server aiming to replace XFree86"

OK, I assume world+dog knows about the XFree86 vs Keith Packard stoush.
Plus the various "tensions" between that project and Gnome+KDE.

But my understanding was that Havoc was all for still working with the
XFree86 project. So is this really a "replacement" for XFree86
(i.e. enough people have given up on working with them) or is it
(as I originally thought) a place to "experiment" with the view to folding
things back into XFree86?

Politics of the X server

Posted Nov 25, 2003 7:28 UTC (Tue) by ctg (subscriber, #3459) [Link]

Yes. It seems that way. There is a project called the "xserver", based on "Kdrive" (which was a port of X for handhelds, I believe). This xserver already has quite a different architecture in that drivers for XFree86 can't be used in it.

It has a different compositing method so that much more sophisticated things can be done that with the XFree86 architecture.

In many ways the scope of "xserver" is a lot smaller than the XFree86 project - it will rely on separate projects to complete the picture - opengl and hardware support from DRI, the Hardware Abstraction layer, a replacement for the basic Xlib which is old and doesn't support multithreading etc. very well and so on.

I spent the weekend reading through all the mailing lists... it looks like this will be a platform to launch a major evolution (or revolution) in Linux/UNIX desktop systems.

Politics of the X server

Posted Nov 25, 2003 8:11 UTC (Tue) by pivot (guest, #588) [Link]

". . . the new X Server aiming to replace XFree86"

These are the words of the interviewer, not Keith P.

But indeed, we will probably end up with a situation where there are two competing free X11 server implementation that differ in spirit and implementation similar to the situation with the Linux distros and the *BSDs.