x.org is Hacker Trash

[JM Ibanez]

"Jon Senior" <jon at restlesslemon.co.uk> writes:

> This is a non-trivial build, and I didn't make things easy for myself
> by attempting to do it by hand. A few additional required libraries
> (One of the font ones... I don't remember off-hand which) were hard to
> locate but aside from those dependency issues it was fairly easy (If
> long-winded). For various reasons, which included curiosity, I opened
> the build script in an editor, located the dependency list (Relatively
> easy to find) and built each module in order, untarring, building and
> installing manually.

Interestingly enough, I got by building the following modules
individually:

   * xorg/xserver
   * xorg/xf86-video-intel (my driver)
   * xorg/xf86-input-{evdev,keyboard,mouse}

and I got a usable X server out of that. It helps that my setup already
has an existing X server, so I didn't need to build the utilities
(xkbcomp, xmodmap, etc.) as those will work with any X server anyway.

The one thing I *did* have to do that I didn't find documented (I might
have not looked hard enough though ;), and this was non-intuitive, was
to get xkbcomp in my /usr/local/bin, since I installed the
custom-compiled X server as --prefix=/usr/local -- without it, the X
server would refuse input from my keyboard.

Considering that the original poster complained about a 500MB download,
I only had to download:

   * 94MB for the X server
   * 21MB for the Intel driver
   *  5MB each for the input drivers, for a total of 15MB

which gives me a total download of ~131MB.

Additionally, since I downloaded it via git, I have the entire
repository history for those particular pieces, and if I want to (and I
probably will), I can safely mess around with the code, create private
branches for my work, and pull in changes from fd.o upstream.


-- 
JM Ibanez
Senior Software Engineer
Orange & Bronze Software Labs, Ltd. Co.

jm at orangeandbronze.com
http://software.orangeandbronze.com/