X Window Environment

There are several files that need to be fetched from the download location:

The first package contains the Xorg libraries and support programs, the second contains standard X programs, the third contains the X server, the fourth and fifth are fonts, the sixth is normal documentation, and the seventh is hardcopy documentation.

To check your downloads for integrity, download the md5sums file. Then:

md5sum -c md5sums

All seven packages should give an OK status.

If you have an Intel P6 (Pentium Pro, Pentium II and later), it is recommended that you compile MTRR (Memory Type Range Registers) support into the kernel. The kernel can map Cyrix and AMD CPUs to the MTRR interface, so selecting this option is useful for those processors also. This option is found in the "Processor type and features" menu. It can increase performance of image write operations 2.5 times or more on PCI or AGP video cards.

In the "Character Devices" section, enable AGP Support and select the chipset support on your motherboard. If you do not know the chipset, you may select all the chip types at the expense of extra kernel size. You can usually determine your motherboard's chipset by doing:

cat /proc/pci

In the "Character Devices" section, disable Direct Rendering Manager unless you have a Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) supported video card. A complete list of DRI supported video cards can be found at http://dri.sourceforge.net in the Status section. Currently, supported cards include those from 3dfx (Voodoo, Banshee), 3Dlabs, ATI (Rage Pro, Rage 128, Radeon 7X00, Radeon 2), Intel (i810, i815), and Matrox (G200, G400, G450). If you do enable DRI here, make sure you select the video card(s) you want to support as a module.

Additionally NVidia provides their own closed source binary drivers, which do not make use of DRI. If you intend to use these drivers, do not enable DRI.

If you made any changes to the kernel configuration, recompile the kernel.

Copy the arch/i386/boot/bzImage and System.map from the kernel build directory to /boot. Edit /boot/grub/grub.conf and add the new kernel to the boot menu. (If you use lilo, edit /etc/lilo.conf and run lilo.)

Note

If you build Xorg in a chroot environment, make sure the kernel version of the base system and the target system are the same. This is especially important if you enabled DRI support as a module as instructed above.

When building Xorg, you should create a shadow directory of symbolic links for the compiled code. To do that, we first make the lndir. Starting from the xc directory:

pushd config/util &&
make -f Makefile.ini lndir &&
cp lndir /usr/bin/ &&
popd

Now create the shadow tree:

mkdir ../xcbuild &&
cd ../xcbuild &&
lndir ../xc

The next step is to create the config/cf/host.def file. The documentation for Xorg indicates that the application will build without a host.def file, but the included libraries for fontconfig and freetype2 do not build properly on a base LFS system. Therefore, you must specify that these libraries, as well as others, should be imported from the system.

Note

config/cf/host.def is a C file, not a shell script. Ensure the comments delimited by /* ... */ are balanced when modifying the file.

cat > config/cf/host.def << "EOF"
/* Begin Xorg host.def file */
 
/* System Related Information.  If you read and configure only one
 * section then it should be this one.  The Intel architecture defaults are
 * set for a i686 and higher.  Axp is for the Alpha architecture and Ppc is
 * for the Power PC.  AMD64 is for the Opteron processor. Note that there have 
 * been reports that the Ppc optimization line causes segmentation faults during 
 * build.  If that happens, try building without the DefaultGcc2PpcOpt line.  ***********/
 
/* #define DefaultGcc2i386Opt -O2 -fno-strength-reduce -fno-strict-aliasing -march=i686 */
/* #define DefaultGccAMD64Opt -O2 -fno-strength-reduce -fno-strict-aliasing */
/* #define DefaultGcc2AxpOpt  -O2 -mcpu=ev6 */
/* #define DefaultGcc2PpcOpt  -O2 -mcpu=750 */

#define HasFreetype2             YES
#define HasFontconfig            YES
#define HasExpat                 YES
#define HasLibpng                YES
#define HasZlib                  YES

/*
 * Which drivers to build.  When building a static server, each of these
 * will be included in it.  When building the loadable server each of these
 * modules will be built.
 *
#define XF86CardDrivers         mga glint nv tga s3virge sis rendition \
                                neomagic i740 tdfx savage \
                                cirrus vmware tseng trident chips apm \
                                GlideDriver fbdev i128 \
                                ati AgpGartDrivers DevelDrivers ark cyrix \
                                siliconmotion \
                                vesa vga XF86OSCardDrivers XF86ExtraCardDrivers
*/

/*
 * Select the XInput devices you want by uncommenting this.
 *
#define XInputDrivers           mouse keyboard acecad calcomp citron \
                                digitaledge dmc dynapro elographics \
                                microtouch mutouch penmount spaceorb summa \
                                wacom void magictouch aiptek
 */

/* Most installs will only need this */

#define XInputDrivers           mouse keyboard


/* End Xorg host.def file */
EOF

There are several other options that you may want to consider. A well documented example file is config/cf/xorgsite.cf.

Install Xorg by running the following commands:

( make World 2>&1 | tee xorg-compile.log && exit $PIPESTATUS ) &&
make install &&
make install.man &&
ln -sf ../X11R6/bin /usr/bin/X11 &&
ln -sf ../X11R6/lib/X11 /usr/lib/X11 &&
ln -sf ../X11R6/include/X11 /usr/include/X11

If you have one of the supported DRI cards and have enabled DRI kernel modules as explained above, you now need to update the kernel modules to ensure they are compatible with the current version of Xorg. To do this, perform the following:

cd programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/os-support/linux/drm/kernel &&
make  CC=/opt/gcc-2.95.3/bin/gcc -f Makefile.linux  &&
mkdir -p /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/char/drm/  &&
cp gamma.o radeon.o sis.o r128.o i810.o i830.o mga.o tdfx.o \
    /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/char/drm/  &&
depmod -a

Warning

If you recompile or upgrade your kernel, you will need to re-copy the appropriate driver module(s) to the kernel module library and rerun the depmod -a command.

Note

If you created AGP support as a module when compiling the kernel, you may have to add a line to /etc/modules.conf to ensure the agpgart module is loaded. For instance, the AGP version of the Radeon video card will use the radeon.o driver. It will need to have the line

below radeon agpgart

in /etc/modules.conf to enable DRI support.