Quote:
Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker
What is Xenocara anyway? I know it's Xorg converted to BSDMake (Instead of GNU autotools), but does it also contain fixes and stuff? In other words, is it really different (better) that vanilla Xorg?
Might it be worth trying to build&run Xenocara on FreeBSD?
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Xenocara is de facto OpenBSD fork of XOrg. It is heavily patched XOrg which is used on OpenBSD. As you probably know X is more intimately integrated with OpenBSD than FreeBSD. X is not the part of the OpenBSD ports tree like in FreeBSD. You can only select to install X during the OS installation and you have no choice of which parts of X will be installed.
I am almost sure that you can not compile Xenocara on anything else but
OpenBSD.
That is significant for two reasons. Incorrectly configured X server is the source of the greatest security risk on the typical desktop installation. This way X is server is configured by a security competent dedicated OpenBSD/X developer.
Secondly, since the X is in some week sense part of the OpenBSD kernel it is subject to the same standards of OpenBSD. That means that it
is stable as ROCK and works as advertised.
The negative side of above approach is that in terms of X and drivers you
get only the things which are consider by OpenBSD team as stable and usable. XOrg used by OpenBSD is usually one version number behind the XOrg releases.
Common complain by a typical Linux user is that Xenocara doesn't support 3D. That is absolute nonsense. The truth is that 3D is much more stable on OpenBSD than anything else but is limited (particularly on i386 junk) in the scope of the hardware it supports.
For example Xenocara does support accelerated X server on quite a few
SUN video cards but a typical Linux and if you want FreeBSD user couldn't care less about non Wintel Hardware.