Time for a second “Debian XSF News” issue! I’ll skip stuff related to the new katamari since I wrote about that already.

• I reassigned a big memory leak to the kernel. It happens with a Radeon HD 4200 card and the xserver-xorg-video-ati driver.

• I mentioned on debian-boot@ how to reassign bug to the xorg meta package. We regularly receive bug reports about either X-related issues in the graphical installer, or about the just-installed X stack.

• I started a xsf-docs repository to hold some documentation, trying to keep up-to-date information about the X stack. The wiki is unfortunately a bit of a mess, and contains some very old stuff like an ancient FAQ. This has historical value, but doesn’t really help. ;) The new documentation lives at http://pkg-xorg.alioth.debian.org/, and it should be packaged at some point (maybe merged into an existing package).

• Julien Cristau uploaded xorg-server 2:1.7.7-10 to unstable, and it was unblocked for squeeze.

• Triage happened on the xorg meta package, which should be our “frontdesk”: people should report or reassign bugs against this package when they’re not sure which X component is at fault.

• The intel driver was tweaked to fail properly if KMS is disabled, so that the X server autodetection code could fall back to vesa. Unfortunately, it turned out to be insufficient in some cases. That was fixed in the “♫ we wish you a working driver ♫” release. The latter migrated to squeeze.

• On a related note, we discovered (through bug reports), that the intel driver in experimental somehow “needs” libdrm-intel1 from experimental. Not that symbols would be missing, but some nasty bugs happen when the version from unstable is used instead. We still need to address this issue.

• Julien pushed more patches to the server-1.7-branch upstream, which I merged, uploaded as 2:1.7.7-11, and got unblocked for squeeze. A crasher was reported right after that, but it’s probably going to wait for squeeze r1 (see next entry).

• Bernhard R. Link reported an issue with old XF86Config-4 configuration files. We cloned that bug report and fixed both in git. I’ll probably upload xorg-server 2:1.7.7-12 to unstable soon with those fixes. Then we’ll probably upload 2:1.7.7-12~squeeze1 to stable-proposed-updates once squeeze is released.

• To keep track of this kind of bugs, I’ve started using the squeeze-candidate usertag. That’s documented in the “how to triage bugs” page, added to xsf-docs.

• I updated the cirrus driver to improve support in QEMU and FAUmachine, it’s been unblocked for squeeze.

• I fixed partial upgrades for the libx11-6 and libx11-data packages.

• Julien Viard de Galbert has been very active in the bug triaging area! See the reports: TXBW3, TXBW4+5, TXBW6, TXBW7, TXBW8.

• He also blogged about how easy it is to triage X bugs. Join the fun!

• I also wrote a tiny doc about configuring input, and poked a bunch of bugs for the following input drivers: evdev, kbd, mouse, and synaptics.

• I digged into the infamous gdm3 bug, which causes xkb options to be lost when one logs in. A summary is available in the upstream bug report.