Updating X

[James Wilkinson]

John Heffington wrote:
> Howdy! First off, what graphical environment does X use??? Is it 
> XFree86, DRI, or X.org???? Secondly, depending on which environment, how 
> do I upgrade? I want 3D OpenGL support, I could use some help here. Thanks!!

Hmm. Good luck.

Short answer: Fedora uses X.org, DRI is something else altogether, and
we'll need to know your video chipset manufacturer and model (e.g. ATi
Radeon 9200, Nvidia GeForce 4, etc) to give you much help.

Long answer: X is the basic underlying protocol. The definition, if you
like. Computers can't run definitions: they need to be implemented
(turned into programs).

Historically, there was a standard implementation of *most* of what was
necessary for X, released by the X Consortium. A project called XFree86
turned this into something that could be (relatively) easily installed,
which was used by those Linux and BSD distributions that included
graphics support.

In the past couple of years, underlying resentment about the pace and
style of development came to a head when the XFree86 Project made what
was seen as an autocratic change to licenses, and wouldn't back down. So
a relatively new group, X.org, took over the X Consortium's role and
XFree86's role, and now practically every distribution (including
Fedora) uses the X.org version of X.

X is a pretty low-level protocol. It has been described as a network
protocol that knows how to draw. So you need a window manager, like
Sawfish or Metacity, and a user environment like Gnome or KDE to make a
usable desktop.

With Fedora, all this is configured for you. But you should know it's
there.

DRI, the Direct Rendering Infrastructure, is something else that does a
different job. It works with X.org and XFree86. It allows 3D
applications to efficiently communicate with the 3D hardware in the
video card.

As for how you upgrade, by far the easiest way is to get the latest
Fedora release. That should be pretty well up to date.

Hope this helps,

James.

-- 
E-mail address: james | We still have enough spare cardboard sitting around
@westexe.demon.co.uk  | to send a bus by Parcelforce, although not enough
                      | wrapping to be sure they wouldn't deliver it broken
                      | into two pieces.  -- Alan Cox