[ANNOUNCE] X11R7.7

Alan Coopersmith alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
Wed Jun 6 16:36:14 PDT 2012


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The X.Org Foundation and the global community of X.Org developers
announce the release of X11R7.7 - Release 7.7 of the X Window System,
Version 11.  This release is the eighth modular release of the X Window
System.  The next full release will be X11R7.8 and may happen in 2013.

This release is part of our celebration of 25 years of X11, recognizing
the 25th anniversary of X Window System Version 11, Release 1 (X11R1) on
September 15, 1987.   We will continue this celebration later this year
at the X.Org Developer Conference, hosted by SuSE in Nürnberg, Germany on
September 19-21 (details on http://wiki.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC2012/ ).

X11R7.7 supports Linux, BSD, Solaris, MacOS X, Microsoft Windows and
GNU Hurd systems. It incorporates both new features and stability and
correctness fixes, including support for reporting multi-touch events
from touchpads and touchscreens which can report input from more than
one finger at a time, smoother scrolling from scroll wheels, better
cross referencing & formatting of the documentation, pointer barriers
to control cursor movement, and synchronization fences to coordinate
between X and other rendering engines such as OpenGL.

The full source code is free to use, modify and redistribute, under
permissive open source licenses, and is available now from
	http://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/
and mirrors worldwide.

For more information on the X Window System, including how to get
involved with development, please see http://www.x.org.   The X.Org
Foundation thanks all those who contributed in some way to this release,
and has attempted to provide a comprehensive list to credit everyone in
the Release Notes.   (Apologies to anyone we missed, as a list this large
had to be put together via scripting, and mistakes may have crept in.)

______________________________________________________________________________

Summary of new features in X11R7.7

This is a sampling of the new features in X11R7.7.

  ● Multi-touch events are now supported for touchpads and touchscreens which
    can report position information on more than one finger providing input at
    the same time, such as found on many tablets and recent laptops. These are
    exposed by Xorg server 1.12 and later via the Xinput extension version 2.2.

  ● Additional Xinput extension features were introduced in version 2.1, as
    supported in Xorg server 1.11, including allowing clients to track raw
    events from input devices, additional detail in scrolling events so that
    clients may perform smoother scrolling, and additional constants in the
    Xlib-based libXi API.

  ● More progress has been made on the X.Org Documentation modernization - the
    rest of the library and protocol specifications have been converted to
    DocBook XML from the variety of formats they were previously in, and
    support for cross-linking between documents hase been added. On most
    systems these documents will be installed under /usr/share/doc/. They are
    also posted on the X.Org website at http://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/

  ● Fence objects are now available in Version 3.1 of the Synchronization
    (“Sync”) extension. These allow clients to create a object that is either
    in “triggered” or “not-triggered” state, and to perform actions when the
    object becomes triggered. When a client requests a fence be triggered, the
    X server will first complete all rendering from previous requests that
    affects resources owned by the fence's screen before changing the state, so
    that clients may synchronize with such rendering. Support for these has
    been added to both the libxcb-sync and libXext API's.

  ● Pointer barriers were added by X Fixes extension Version 5.0. Compositing
    managers and desktop environments may have UI elements in particular screen
    locations such that for a single-headed display they correspond to easy
    targets, for example, the top left corner. For a multi-headed environment
    these corners should still be semi-impermeable. Pointer barriers allow the
    application to define additional constraint on cursor motion so that these
    areas behave as expected even in the face of multiple displays.

  ● The XCB libraries have begun adding support for the GLX and XKB extensions.
    This work is not yet complete in this release, and not all of the
    functionality available through these extensions is accessibile via the XCB
    APIs. Some of this effort was funded by past Google Summer of Code
    projects.

A more complete list of changes can be found in the ChangeLog files that are
part of the source of each X module, or the consolidation ChangeLogs containing
all changes from all modules in this release:
	http://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/changelog.html  (1.5 Mb)
	http://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/changelog.txt   (0.4 Mb)

- -- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-              alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
	 Oracle Solaris Engineering - http://blogs.oracle.com/alanc
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