Installing xorg >= 7.0

Jeremy C. Reed reed at reedmedia.net
Wed Nov 28 22:23:24 PST 2007


On Thu, 29 Nov 2007, BuraphaLinux Server wrote:

> No painless way exists.  The easy 'make world' was replaced with a
> dependancy hell so you will give up and just use the distribution
> provided binaries.  Thus we have open source that makes you use
> binaries because it is just too hard to compile your own copy.  You
> don't download one package, you download hundreds, and just finding
> them all can be a hassle.  Good luck, you'll need it.

This is a little misleading. Yes, it is true that it may be more difficult 
to do an initial install from source.

But when you want to do later updates of software you are interested in or 
need, it is almost always quicker and easier to update from source those 
individual components (versus fetching huge amounts of source and 
rebuilding and reinstalling all of X11 suite).

Also in many cases you don't need a complete installation of the X11 
suite.

As an example, yesterday I installed a window manager and its modular 
X.org needs were only:

1) libXft
2) libXrender
3) libX11
4) libXpm
5) libXinerama
6) libXext
7) libXt
8) libSM
9) libICE
10) libXau
11) libXdmcp

Plus some build needs:

12) xproto
13) kbproto
14) renderproto
15) xextproto
16) bigreqsproto
17) inputproto
18) xcmiscproto
19) xf86bigfontproto
20) xtrans
21) xineramaproto

So only 21 components out of well over 100 possible X.org components.



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