Re: X on NetBSD

On Tue, Jul 17, 2007 at 10:48:45PM +0200, Rafael Ruiz wrote:
> Hi All!
> I would like to know why *BSD has problems with X (Xorg or XFree) on Alpha
> Platform. I like NetBSD, FreeBSD, but i have a lot of problem for use X on
> these. X runs very well on Linux/Alpha but i would like to work with BSD and
> to make a workstation with X. Why *BSD don't let X work on Alpha? This in
> not problem of X. In old versions of FreeBSD like 4.5 and so, XFree ran
> good.
>

I had the same problem with my Alphastation 500au. However (after some
googling and hacking) I managed to get XFree86 4.5 (I think) to build
and run perfectly on NetBSD. I had to lie to pkgsrc about having Xorg
installed but that was my only issue. I don't recall precicely what
I had to change but I think it had to do with void pointers. I can
provide a binary or source tarball or I can do some scrounging and
figure out what I had to change.

I also remember finding a page containing patches for XFree86 for Alpha,
I didn't end up using them but they looked similar to what I had ended
up doing. Can't find that link now either :(

I'd prefer to run Xorg, but I couldn't find *any* documentation on
making it run on Alpha, I suspect the Xorg people just don't care about
the platform. Also, building modular xorg from source by hand was not
something that looked like fun, if pkgsrc supports modular Xorg now you
might be able to get it to compile. The Xservers included with netbsd
were worthless on my glint videocard so at the time XFree was my only
possible option.

My only Alpha box running OpenBSD doesn't have a decent graphics card so
I haven't looked at XFree on OpenBSD in particular, but I think what I
did for NetBSD should work on OpenBSD. It was a very general hack IIRC.

Andrew