Re: NetBSD 6.0/amd64 on a Latitude E5500 (X11 related)

[Peter Bex <Peter.Bex%xs4all.nl@localhost>]

On Mon, Dec 03, 2012 at 09:58:25PM +0100, iMil wrote:
> Hi Peter,
> 
> Yes that's the spirit, while we're making quite some noise around
> the 6.0 release, I know some newcomers who've been reluctant to pursue
> the experience because they were unable to fix their X11
> environment, which is a shame considering the overall quality of the
> system.

Absolutely, that's the reason I've stuck with NetBSD for so long :)

I've noticed that the 6 release has quite a few issues; more than I'm
used to between major NetBSD versions.  I think this may be due to the
long wait between 5 and 6, too many bugs crept in that weren't ironed
out because people don't use -current enough.  I'm guilty of sticking
with stable releases too :P  Like most people, I don't have a spare
computer plus the time and energy to mess around with unstable versions.
I ran the 6 BETA kernel succesfully for a long time, however!

> >I used modular Xorg a few times in the past, but I [...]
> >got glitches and crashes at various points in time.
> 
> Did you? I've been using modular Xorg from pkgsrc for almost all
> 5.{0,1} lifetime and its been rock-solid, never had a glitch nor
> a crash with it.

Yeah, I had to when I was on macppc (between 4.0 and 5.0, IIRC).
Don't remember why I decided to switch away from base X.
My trouble may have just been due to bad luck that I had an ati card,
the driver for which saw a lot of development at the time.  Nevertheless,
releases should be stable.

> Very interesting point, we (NetBSDfr) don't really know what are the
> legal risks of providing those restricted packages here in France. As
> you say, most GNU/Linux distros provide these packages.

Does NetBSDfr provide them?  And what about the codecs?

> >I'd love to try this but I still consider Xorg's release crapshoot
> >too risky.  It's a shame there's no other free X implementation which
> >cares about non-Linux OSes.
> 
> I can only tell you that my laptop is now perfectly usable :)
> I plan to upgrade my two other NetBSD-based workstations with it as
> soon as the build for their architecture is finished.

Good news.  Perhaps the base X driver versions can be updated to those
you've packaged, if these are indeed better and solve the problems
at hand?

Cheers,
Peter
-- 
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