XOrg on Debian

I took the plunge yesterday, and installed XOrg on Debian. First, some history. A year ago (or so), XFree86 development was going at a snail's pace, and Keith Packard (+friends) decided that the only way to get any real development done was to fork XFree86. This was initially greeted with a large sigh of apathy from the community, as well as a separate fork the name of which I can't remember. Anyway, not long after, the XFree86 people decided to change their license to incude a Free Software-Incompatible clause, basically requiring that anything that use X prominently display the (huge) list of authors. That would mean Red Hat, Debian, etc. would have had to feature huge splash screens, despite the fact that XFree86 was notorious for not accepting patches from distributions. OpenBSD were the first to announce they would stick to an old XFree release, followed by Debian, and then just about everyone else. Shortly afterwards, Xorg became usable and just about everyone switched... except Debian, who plan to switch after Sarge becomes Stable (capital S because Stable is a distribution, not a phrase). This is annoying for Debian users like myself; overall, Debian is excellent. Unfortunately, the old XFree86 doesn't hold a candle to XOrg - and having to wait months for integration to begin after Sarge goes Stable is a pain in the arse. The fact that Stable will then go for years without XOrg basically rules it out as a desktop client (and Unstable tends to be a bit scary after Stable releases, since that's when they really start experimenting again).

Fortunately, installing XOrg proved to be pretty easy, although there aren't as many instructions out there as I'd like. Step one was to modify /etc/apt/sources.list to include the following line:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary main restricted

Step two was to do the usual "apt-get update", followed by "apt-get install xorg-xserver xorg-common". Wait.

Step three was to rename /X11/X, and then symlink /etc/X11/X to /etc/usr/bin/X11/Xorg.

Step four: reboot. XOrg worked first time for me, complete with my Nvidia drivers. Wooty woot. Finally, I went into Synaptic, and did a smart upgrade after telling Synaptic to favour Debian packages rather than the Ubuntu ones we added to sources.list.

The end results are pretty good. Font rendering is MUCH nicer. Once I enabled Composite Rendering with the following section in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4, everything was zoomy:

Section "Extensions"
     Option "Composite" "Enable"
     Option "RENDER" "Enable"
   EndSection

Finally, I setup Gnome to run "xcompmgr -c" in the background. All my windows have nice dropshadows now.

Oh, and if you try this at home with an nVidia card, make sure that you enable nVidia render acceleration by including Option "RenderAccel" "true" in your Device (nvidia) section under the Driver nvidia line.

So far, so good. It's not quite as stable as XFree was, and has locked up on me when logging out - but it's a whole lot more usable.
Mood: accomplished
Music: Dio - Don't Tell The Kids