[Aboriginal] Building X

[Rob Landley]

On 06/05/2011 06:58 AM, Niklas Brunbäck wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> Has anyone successfully built Kdrive/TinyX from X{org,Free86} with
> aboriginal on x86?

I've built x11.org under aboriginal on Hexagon, so x86 should be pretty
straightforward.  Go read Beyond Linux From Scratch and follow their
section on installing X11.  You can find the most current one here, see
chapter 23:

  http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/

I note that the question is a bit off.  Nobody's built XFree86 under
anything since about 2003, it's a dead project because its' maintainer
went insane.

Keith Packard is one of the original developers who invented X11 at MIT
back in 1987, and he's the guy who tried to clean up the horrible mess
of XFree86, thus creating tinyx (which was later renamed kdrive, they're
the same thing).  Keith then got kicked out of the XFree86 project by
said insane maintainer who felt extremely threatened by him, since Keith
was such a better programmer that he made the other guy look incompetent.

Keith then opened a new repository to host his work on x.org, and
continued his rewrite of xfree86 (which was all based on his original
X11 work at MIT anyway), and that's what everybody uses these days.

Keith's x.org project is based on his tinyx/kdrive code, the old
bloated/brittle xfree86 core engine is gone.  You don't have to build it
in a special mode to make massive bloat go away: it's just not bloated
to begin with.

So asking "has anybody built xfree86 recently" is a bit like asking "has
anybody built SCO UnixWare recently".  The answer is no, because they
went crazy years ago.

I followed the BLFS x.org instructions, and got 'em to work.  You have
to build something like three dozen packages (keith broke up the xfree86
hairball and made it very modular), but you can work out a list and put
'em in a for loop: they all build with the same command line.  BLFS
actually has said list, although I think it's an attached text file or
something...

I mean to add an X build stage to the lfs-bootstrap but the uClibc NPTL
stuff comes first...

> Niklas

Rob