[SL-devel] Xorg-server 1.5

[Mitch Harder (aka DontPanic)]

Xorg-server-1.5, the centerpiece of the imminent X.org 7.4 release,
has been out now for nearly a week.

This release creates a problem in that ati proprietary drivers and
nvidia legacy proprietary drivers have not released drivers compatible
with xorg-server 1.5 (however, newer nvidia cards are supported).

So what's in xorg-server-1.5 that is so important?  Well despite my
previous e-mails touting the importance of xorg-server-1.5, it seems
the package was released without most of the features that I was
eagerly anticipating (dri2 has been pushed back to >=1.6), or the
features have already found their way into xorg-server-1.4.2 (such as
evdev).

I ran across an informative article on Phoronix that goes over the
history of xorg-server 1.5, and what features made it and what
features didn't.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=xorg_74_released&num=1

Despite my disappointment in the feature set, xorg-server-1.5 does
seem to be fully and robustly functional, and most of the problems I'm
seeing online are related to the ati and nvidia-legacy proprietary
drivers.  I'm also seeing several distros eagerly adopting xorg-server
1.5 (RedHat would like to have you think they had xorg-server-1.5
along with a buggy DRI2 in Fedora-9 back in March).

So, while xorg-server-1.5 appears to be a competent release, I think
it would still make sense to provide some kind of support for
xorg-server-1.4.2 (whether it be through the main entropy, or a
Wiki-HowTo, or a separate user entropy repository).  I keep running
across posts from disaffected Fedora-9 users who have been left on
their own to scrap together a "Plan B" for their legacy nvidia cards
or their ati cards (Fedora 9 does not have a fall-back to
xorg-server-1.4.x unless you manually drop back to Fedora 8 for those
packages).  I think we can learn from Fedora's mistakes.

For myself, I'm more familiar with nVidia cards, so I would love to
hear some feedback, especially from the ATI people.