DaemonForums  

Go Back   DaemonForums > Miscellaneous > General software and network

General software and network General OS-independent software and network questions, X11, MTA, routing, etc.

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #1   (View Single Post)  
Old 24th May 2009
Carpetsmoker's Avatar
Carpetsmoker Carpetsmoker is offline
Real Name: Martin
Tcpdump Spy
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Netherlands
Posts: 2,243
Default Xorg taking the fun out of BSD

Let's rant, shall we?

Xorg is seriously starting to annoy me, and taking the fun out of BSD.
At this point, my laptop is non-functional, it will freeze when using Xorg, it works fine when using the console or Vista ... Probably some stupid part no one cares about except some linux hippies who want to use 3D terminal windows or whatever rewrote something to get it to work ...

Back in the good old XFree/Xorg 6.9 days I almost *never* had any issues with Xorg, I'm not saying it was perfect, or that it wasn't lacking in certain areas, but it was stable and almost always worked.

Ever since Xorg 7.0 I've had nothing but trouble, crashes, odd setups (hal!), odd bugs (Like the Generic Event extension ``bug'', just how idiot was that?), you name it.

BSD used to be something I liked using, mainly because it's so easy&natural for me to use but now I'm using Windows XP at home because it's easier & more natural ... Yes, at this point I'd rather deal with the Windows registry than with Xorg, at least the registry behaves predictably and doesn't get rewritten every release.

There are no real alternatives available ... I considered using Xorg 6.9 but that would take considerable work ...
Since every UNIX and UNIX-like OS uses Xorg (OSX excepted, but I'm not buying an overpriced/under-quality MAC just for the OS) it would seem the best "solution" is to use Windows ... Which is exactly what I'm doing now ...
Isn't that sad? All because of these stupid Xorg ...
__________________
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.
Reply With Quote
  #2   (View Single Post)  
Old 24th May 2009
BSDfan666 BSDfan666 is offline
Real Name: N/A, this is the interweb.
Banned
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Ontario, Canada
Posts: 2,223
Default

I never have problems with Xorg, instead of dismissing it entirely.. how about posting the configuration file so we can fix it for you?

Windows is never a solution.
Reply With Quote
  #3   (View Single Post)  
Old 24th May 2009
TerryP's Avatar
TerryP TerryP is offline
Arp Constable
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: USofA
Posts: 1,547
Default

Maybe it is because my systems have been more stable then ever before, maybe it is because I tried carefully selecting them to be sure "it just works", but I think you should consider trying different hardware - or writing code.

Just a thought.
__________________
My Journal

Thou shalt check the array bounds of all strings (indeed, all arrays), for surely where thou typest ``foo'' someone someday shall type ``supercalifragilisticexpialidocious''.
Reply With Quote
  #4   (View Single Post)  
Old 24th May 2009
Oko's Avatar
Oko Oko is offline
Rc.conf Instructor
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Kosovo, Serbia
Posts: 1,102
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by BSDfan666 View Post
I never have problems with Xorg, instead of dismissing it entirely.. how about posting the configuration file so we can fix it for you?

Windows is never a solution.
That is because you do not use vanilla XOrg You are using Xenocara

Quote:
Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker View Post
Let's rant, shall we?
Back in the good old XFree/Xorg 6.9 days I almost *never* had any issues with Xorg, I'm not saying it was perfect, or that it wasn't lacking in certain areas, but it was stable and almost always worked.

Ever since Xorg 7.0 I've had nothing but trouble, crashes, odd setups (hal!), odd bugs (Like the Generic Event extension ``bug'', just how idiot was that?), you name it.
I am completely with you Carpetsmoker. My experience with vanilla XOrg on FreeBSD was very similar. I do think that XOrg mess is a window of opportunity for XFree to come back. Nothing would make me more happy than having a simple, reliable, implementation of X.

Use of HAL for configuration of X server speaks volumes. I am really sick
and tired of Linux Desktop and their agenda. For my grandmother and alike there is a Unix based alternative for Windows and is called OS X.
When I use BSD, I want to use Unix and I could not care less if it doesn't work for my grandmother and her friends.

Last edited by Oko; 24th May 2009 at 08:04 PM.
Reply With Quote
  #5   (View Single Post)  
Old 24th May 2009
DrJ DrJ is offline
ISO Quartermaster
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Gold Country, CA
Posts: 507
Default

I agree too. There is always something that is broken in Xorg, or has changed so that old things don't work, or whatnot. It really is irritating. After 6.9 rolled into history, I've increasingly yearned for XFree. At least it was one thing I did not have to worry about, as it never failed me. At least once I got a .conf that did what I wanted it to.

The sad thing is that most of the rest of our user software, at least the desktop flavors, relies on Linux software too. In my experience those ports are not much different than what we have said about xorg.

The server-side stuff is different.
Reply With Quote
  #6   (View Single Post)  
Old 24th May 2009
Oko's Avatar
Oko Oko is offline
Rc.conf Instructor
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Kosovo, Serbia
Posts: 1,102
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by DrJ View Post

The sad thing is that most of the rest of our user software, at least the desktop flavors, relies on Linux software too. In my experience those ports are not much different than what we have said about xorg.
Not mine . The only things I personally use which could be considered "Linux Projects" are sane-backend (although I must admit that they are really OK with complete Unix support) and MPlayer. Absolutely everyting else or almost everything (until GCC gets replaced with PPC and Groff with Nroff) is non GPL software. The only part of MPlayer I really care is actually mencoder. Everything else is irrelevant for me.
Reply With Quote
  #7   (View Single Post)  
Old 24th May 2009
vermaden's Avatar
vermaden vermaden is offline
Administrator
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: pl_PL.lodz
Posts: 1,056
Default

Cant agree more Carpetsmoker :/

When s/XFree/Xorg/g thing happened, all things started ti degrade slowly, release after release ...

Thinkgs that worked flawwlessly for years have been broken/dropped just like that without any reasonable reason, like CTRL + ALT + NUMPAD PLUS/MINUS for switching between reslutions, like disabling the CTRL + ALT + BACKSPACE shortcut by default (what the fsck for?).

All this Linux like madness of rewriting every possible subsystem just to add some small features and fix old bugs (and add many new ones) with breaking all backward compatibility with several other subsystems is just broken.

Just how many 2D accelration techniques have been recently developed, XXA, EXA, now UXA, what next ...

Now we have HALd as a dependency (not yet mandatory), maybe we will have PulseAudio or even ALSA in some near time as a mandatory dependency on Xorg even just to see naked xterm with prompt

When all this rewriting swamp started I thought nice, we should have some really improoved x11 in some near time, but as we all see this rewriting never ends, and developers rewrite again all subsystems because some feature was missed.

Its just sick.
__________________
religions, worst damnation of mankind
"If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened." Linus Torvalds

Linux is not UNIX! Face it! It is not an insult. It is fact: GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not UNIX”.
vermaden's: links resources deviantart spreadbsd
Reply With Quote
  #8   (View Single Post)  
Old 24th May 2009
BSDfan666 BSDfan666 is offline
Real Name: N/A, this is the interweb.
Banned
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Ontario, Canada
Posts: 2,223
Default

Reevaluating my point for a moment, I do agree that some of the choices.. constant rewriting for one.. is rather annoying.

For example, nouveau is difficult for the BSD projects to port because they keep rewriting large portions of it.. they hardly ever release anything.. billions of git branches.. and they tend to make use of bleeding edge Xorg features that no OS vendor even supports yet.

They also purposefully broke multicard setups I heard, not that I'm a utilizer of that feature.. that does sound awful.

And finally, my friend uses an older integrated Intel graphics chipset.. the maintainers of that driver don't appear to be interested in supporting legacy devices, breakage is quite frequent.

So.. I'm not delusional that Xorg is the perfect project, but in the end it tends to work here the majority of the time, I don't own anything all that powerful anyway.. most of the time the systems I own have r128/mga graphics chipsets.
Reply With Quote
  #9   (View Single Post)  
Old 24th May 2009
phoenix's Avatar
phoenix phoenix is offline
Risen from the ashes
 
Join Date: May 2008
Posts: 696
Default

One of the major problems with Xorg is also one of the major problems with Linux: they've broken it up into individually coded, (almost) separate projects, that all develop at their own pace. There's not such thing as "Xorg 7.4" just as there is no such thing as "Debian Linux 5.0" -- it's just a (virtually) random collection of various modules with different version numbers thrown together as "a release".

It's great that each of the pieces can now be worked on separately, but it really sucks that now each of the pieces is released separately. Work on them separately, but release them as whole. It's like there's no Q/A done to "the collection formerly known as X11", it's all just "compiles? loads? ship it". Just like a Linux distro. It's very irritating.

And the whole "everything that is not Windows is Linux" mentality is getting to be very annoying. So long as it works on Linux, it must work everywhere (since everything is Linux), so it's shipped. And (from what I've heard around the virtual water cooler) the number of Linux-isms in the tree is increasing. I wouldn't really be too surprised if Xorg 8.0 became a Linux-only release, with tight ties into the kernel.

I've never had any real issues running Xorg on my systems, but the reliability and speed has been going down over time, compared to XFree86 4.0.
__________________
Freddie

Help for FreeBSD: Handbook, FAQ, man pages, mailing lists.
Reply With Quote
Old 25th May 2009
adamk adamk is offline
Spam Deminer
 
Join Date: May 2008
Posts: 250
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Oko View Post
That is because you do not use vanilla XOrg You are using Xenocara



I am completely with you Carpetsmoker. My experience with vanilla XOrg on FreeBSD was very similar. I do think that XOrg mess is a window of opportunity for XFree to come back. Nothing would make me more happy than having a simple, reliable, implementation of X.
Funny, I've been using FreeBSD since the 4.* days and see each new Xorg release as a huge step forward.

Right now I have a simple, reliable, implementation of X.

Adam
Reply With Quote
Old 25th May 2009
jb_daefo jb_daefo is offline
Spam Deminer
 
Join Date: May 2008
Posts: 303
Default

My only at-now wish list for Xorg is that it_and_its_dependencies do not
bump so often.
............
Maybe some of the posters above who are disillusioned would benefit from
the below information. ( this is from a file I put in /xorg-server/, I hope
it is accurate. Assumption... an upgrade to any of the ports means most
or all should be rebuilt for stuff to work smoothly. That all *if some* must
be rebuilt (I assume, ) is the reason for my wish-it-bumps-less-often above.
.........
That is all of course on this system, others may have other reasons (ati,)
.....
AFAIK the below is the one-then-the-next upgrade of ports order...
.....
libdrm
dri
libGL
libGLw
/xorg-server/
libGLU
libglut
kldunload nvidia (obsolete here maybe because of the nouveau driver recently installed)
kldload nvidia ( "" )
( glclock, mesa-demos, glxgears, testing)...
.......
(ignoring xorg.conf, that is another issue)

Last edited by jb_daefo; 25th May 2009 at 03:11 AM. Reason: smile as we run glclock...
Reply With Quote
Old 25th May 2009
vermaden's Avatar
vermaden vermaden is offline
Administrator
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: pl_PL.lodz
Posts: 1,056
Default

I wonder, why all major BSDs (and maybe OpenSolaris) will not create their own x11 fork and brong back quality to x11 then rely on this currently broken shit.

OpenBSD already has Xenocara ...
__________________
religions, worst damnation of mankind
"If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened." Linus Torvalds

Linux is not UNIX! Face it! It is not an insult. It is fact: GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not UNIX”.
vermaden's: links resources deviantart spreadbsd
Reply With Quote
Old 25th May 2009
s0xxx's Avatar
s0xxx s0xxx is offline
Package Pilot
 
Join Date: May 2008
Posts: 192
Default

@vermaden

Maybe this will look interesting when it gets done: http://socghop.appspot.com/student_p.../t124022812213
__________________
The best way to learn UNIX is to play with it, and the harder you play, the more you learn.
If you play hard enough, you'll break something for sure, and having to fix a badly broken system is arguably the fastest way of all to learn. -Michael Lucas, AbsoluteBSD
Reply With Quote
Old 25th May 2009
tangram's Avatar
tangram tangram is offline
Real Name: Ricardo Jesus
Port Guard
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Portugal
Posts: 36
Default

I think sooner or later we (the *BSD projects) will have to break with some established concepts. And one of them should be the never ending following of the Linux crowd.

In other words, we need to focus on our strengths and follow our own path. We should stop following projects like Xorg that are committed to the Linux crowd needs. If the Xorg project wants to pursuit Linux needs so be it, they are free to do so and we should just focus on pursuing our needs.

Soon or later the Xorg will be so intertwined with the Linux kernel that we'll be crafting Linux stuff to our kernel just to be able to run X. Else we'll be doomed to always be a couple of steps behind the curve struggling to keep up.

Differentiate not initiate.

I know that speaking is easy and I know that resource are scarce but honestly things are going to get better.
__________________
BSD and Linux tips and tutorials: Blog Linux/BSD: sharing experiences
Reply With Quote
Old 25th May 2009
vermaden's Avatar
vermaden vermaden is offline
Administrator
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: pl_PL.lodz
Posts: 1,056
Default

@s0xxx

It will be great for embedded devices, but without ANY config at all and so its just too much minimalistic, it would be also nice to see how it works/behaves, maybe config is not really needed.

There was also Y Window Server some time ago, totaly rewritten x11 replacement, but no one cared ...

@tangram

Indeed, Xorg is even now too much Linux dependant and moving parts of Linux kernel just to have xterm is little "unfomfortable".
__________________
religions, worst damnation of mankind
"If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened." Linus Torvalds

Linux is not UNIX! Face it! It is not an insult. It is fact: GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not UNIX”.
vermaden's: links resources deviantart spreadbsd
Reply With Quote
Old 25th May 2009
adamk adamk is offline
Spam Deminer
 
Join Date: May 2008
Posts: 250
Default

To be fair, there is nothing, yet, from the linux kernel that is required to have an xterm.

Adam
Reply With Quote
Old 25th May 2009
tangram's Avatar
tangram tangram is offline
Real Name: Ricardo Jesus
Port Guard
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Portugal
Posts: 36
Default

Not exactly Adam.

I remember reading a year ago an interview on Linux Format with Keith Packard from the Xorg project. And there were definitely plans to move some Xorg stuff to Linux kernel.

I'll try to find out where I have the magazine and post some quotes (this can take a while because I think I've left the magazine at my parents house).
__________________
BSD and Linux tips and tutorials: Blog Linux/BSD: sharing experiences
Reply With Quote
Old 25th May 2009
adamk adamk is offline
Spam Deminer
 
Join Date: May 2008
Posts: 250
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by tangram View Post
Not exactly Adam.

I remember reading a year ago an interview on Linux Format with Keith Packard from the Xorg project. And there were definitely plans to move some Xorg stuff to Linux kernel.

I'll try to find out where I have the magazine and post some quotes (this can take a while because I think I've left the magazine at my parents house).
I didn't say that things weren't moving in that direction. Simply that there is nothing, yet, from the linux kernel required to have an xterm.

Mind you, I doubt that there will ever be anything required from the linux kernel to run an xterm. Even if more and more of the drivers move functionality into the DRM (which is certainly happening with kernel mode setting, and 2D/3D acceleration), a simple xterm doesn't require any of those kernel features.

Adam
Reply With Quote
Old 25th May 2009
drhowarddrfine drhowarddrfine is offline
VPN Cryptographer
 
Join Date: May 2008
Posts: 377
Default

I would be interested in seeing such comments made to the Xorg and FreeBSD mailing lists to see what they have to say about this. I would do it myself but feel others can express it better.
Reply With Quote
Old 25th May 2009
Oliver_H's Avatar
Oliver_H Oliver_H is offline
Real Name: Oliver Herold
UNIX lover
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Germany
Posts: 427
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by drhowarddrfine View Post
I would be interested in seeing such comments made to the Xorg and FreeBSD mailing lists to see what they have to say about this. I would do it myself but feel others can express it better.
Why? Most developers I know of are aware of this problem. It's a tightrope walk, '97%' of the software is written on Linux systems so *BSD has to be compatible or it will loose functionality. It's a Linux world already, you can deny something but if you want it, you have to adapt it. It's a sorry-state but reality.
__________________
use UNIX or die :-)
Reply With Quote
Reply

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Installing Xorg NetBSD NetBSD Installation and Upgrading 20 9th June 2009 02:22 PM
Xorg installation LordZ OpenBSD Installation and Upgrading 10 23rd November 2008 05:52 PM
Is xorg necessary....... rex FreeBSD General 10 19th October 2008 03:05 PM
xorg bug? enterhaken FreeBSD Ports and Packages 9 17th July 2008 02:38 PM
Xorg sluggishness tanked FreeBSD Ports and Packages 2 17th May 2008 08:10 PM


All times are GMT. The time now is 06:56 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Content copyright © 2007-2010, the authors
Daemon image copyright ©1988, Marshall Kirk McKusick