README for XFree86[tm] 4.0 The XFree86 Project, Inc 26 February 2000 Abstract XFree86 is a port of X11R6.4 that supports several UNIX(R) and UNIX-like operating systems on Intel and other platforms. 1. What is XFree86 4.0? XFree86 4.0 is the first full release of the new XFree86 4 series. The road to XFree86 4 began in mid 1997, with serious work starting in early 1998. The first pre-4.0 snap- shot was released in mid 1999, and 4.0 was released in early 2000. A lot has been completed in that time, and even more has been started since the "4.0" design was drafted. The result is that this release contains a lot of new features, some new drivers, and some significant performance improvements. This release contains components in various stages of development, ranging from stable and well tested to new and not-so-well tested. One the other side, there are drivers from the 3.3.x series that have not yet been ported to XFree86 4. Most of these are for old hardware. To find more information about which hardware is supported, see the Driver Status document. XFree86 4 uses a very modular design. We had hoped to finalise and fully document the driver module API/ABI in time for the 4.0 release, but instead we are planning to have this done for a subsequent release. We will try where possible to retain backward compatibility with the module interfaces in 4.0 in future releases, but we can't make guarantees about that until the interfaces have been fully documented. Information on this release's features and their status can be found in the Release Notes. Information about obtaining and installing binary distributions of this release can be found in the Installation Document. Copyright and Licensing information for this release can be found in the License Document. 2. Developers If you would like to work on the development of XFree86 4, then it is recom- mended that you join the XFree86 development team . That way you will have access to the latest source and to other developers. 3. How to get XFree86 4.0 XFree86 4.0 can be found at the XFree86 ftp server , and at mirrors of this server. Information about obtaining and installing binary distributions of this release can be found in the Installation Document. Information about obtain- ing the release in source form is given below. The source for version 4.0 is split into three tarballs: X400src-1.tgz, X400src-2.tgz, X400src-3.tgz. The first contains everything except the fonts and general X11 documentation. It is sufficient for building XFree86 is you already have a set of fonts. The second contains the fonts and the source for the general X11 documentation. The third contains the general X11 docu- mentation in hardcopy format. A source patch relative to version 3.9.18 is also available. Because of its size, it is split into two parts. The patch files are 3.9.18-4.0.diff1.gz and 3.9.18-4.0.diff2.gz. These patches should be applied to a clean 3.9.18 source tree, working from the directory containing the xc/ directory. The patches should be applied by running: gunzip < 3.9.18-4.0.diff1.gz | patch -p0 -E gunzip < 3.9.18-4.0.diff2.gz | patch -p0 -E The contrib part of the distribution has now been folded into the main source tree, so a separate contrib tarball is no longer required. To format the XFree86 documentation, the latest version of our doctools pack- age. That is available as doctools-1.1.2.tgz. 4. Reporting Bugs Bugs should be reported to . Before reporting bugs, please check the X server log file, which can be found at /var/log/XFree86.0.log on most platforms. If you can't resolve the problem yourself, send the entire log file with your bug report. Please don't edit out what you think might not be important. The information contained in the log file is there to make it easier for the developers to determine what is going wrong when there are problems. If you have patches (bug fixes or enhancements, etc) that you'd like to sub- mit for inclusion in a future version of XFree86, please send them to . Generated from XFree86: xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/doc/sgml/README.sgml,v 3.103 2000/03/08 20:36:43 dawes Exp $