Building Xorg 7.1 from tarballs

[Dan Nicholson]

On 11/29/06, R.L. Horn <lists at eastcheap.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Nov 2006, Andrew Haninger wrote:
>
> > When I've tried to build X.org 7.0 on a fresh machine, it dies
> > complaining that it needs Mesa installed. When I've tried to build Mesa,
> > it dies complaining that it needs X installed.
>
> I _think_ you can build from scratch by carefully watching the
> dependencies.  First merge the R7.0 and R7.1 source trees.  Build and
> install everything up to the server (except xdriinfo), build the server
> against Mesa sources (6.5 for the R7.1 server) and install.  Finally,
> finish off with the remaining packages.
>
> Now, you should be able to build and install the Mesa libraries (I used
> 6.5.1).  In a bizarre twist, the Mesa build requires makedepend -- which,
> apparently, is used mainly to produce annoyingly irrelevant warning
> messages -- so you need Imake.
>
> Once Mesa is installed, build and install xdriinfo.
>
> Q.E.F., YMMV, TANSTAAFL, usw.
>
> You _might_ have to build and install a non-GL server and have a complete
> kit before doing anything with Mesa.

This isn't true. In the Linuxfromscratch project we bootstrap Xorg.
You just have to watch the dependencies. Mesa needs some X libraries
to link libGL against, but you should be able to build the Xserver
just with the Mesa sources to get glx. For reference, you can see the
LFS instructions here:

http://lfs.osuosl.org/blfs/view/svn/x/xorg7.html

It's a bit out of date as the project is kind of stalled. But, we've
had many people use these instructions successfully. One unneeded hack
that's still in there is always passing --datadir=$XORG_PREFIX/lib.
You shouldn't need to do that as all the autotools seem to be
straightened out for Xorg-7.1. And it really only covers x86.

The jist of it is that after you build the libraries but before you
build the server, you should build Mesa if you want to do it all in
one pass.

Hope that helps.

--
Dan