Time for a seventh “Debian XSF News” issue!

• On the documentation side, I tried to come up with a squeeze backports policy. There are some new upstream releases and xorg-server 1.10 coming up (read below), as well as X stack’s migration to testing, to consider before thinking of backporting though.

• Where backports will likely help is for old intel cards (see our FAQ entry). According to Chris Wilson, current kernels/intel drivers are better for 855+, but 830/845 still need a miracle.

• Migrating the X stack to testing needs a bit of coordination, because of the always painful dependency between the nouveau driver and the Linux kernel version. As mentioned in my mail to debian-release@ that would be quite self-contained otherwise. Bottom line: we’re waiting for the kernel.

• As announced on debian-x@, the plan is to wait for this migration to happen before uploading new upstream releases of libdrm, the intel driver, and mesa to unstable. Both libdrm and mesa were prepared for Ubuntu, and will be likely uploaded to experimental soon. The intel driver was prepared, but only built against xorg-server 1.10 and uploaded to experimental for now.

• On the xorg-server 1.10 side, the (very late) RandR patches were proven broken, so reverting RandR 1.4 was decided. With some minor tweaks (to the radeon driver), that went quite well, and xorg-server 1.10 got released. Unfortunately, there’s still some missing fix for the build system, which explains why I didn’t upload a final 1.10 to experimental yet; several patches were proposed already (I checked a bunch of them), but we’re still waiting for a “final” patch.

• As a result of the RandR 1.4 reverts, the video ABI was broken again. Fortunately I gave it a quick try right before 1.10rc3 got released, and noticed the breakage, so the video ABI got bumped. I was therefore very happy with my decision to only upload a bunch of drivers to experimental, built against 1.10rc* (see DXN#6), since I only needed to upload the following video drivers again: ati, dummy, fbdev, intel, mach64, nouveau, r128, vesa. It might make sense to add cirrus to that list next time, for tests under kvm and the like.

• After I poked Peter Hutterer, he kindly and promptly released snapshots for the following input drivers: kbd, mouse, and synaptics, which I uploaded both to unstable (built against 1.9), and to experimental (built against 1.10).

• If you’re having troubles with your synaptics device, make sure you have no configuration issues in xorg.conf; even if that used to work somehow, autoconfiguration might fail if there’s a misconfigured device (for example, wrong Device option there). You might want to have a look at our how to configure input documentation.

• On the driver side, for 1.9/unstable, Tormod Volden prepared updates for the mga and savage video drivers, which I sponsored.

• Julien Viard de Galbert prepared a new xserver-xorg-video-openchrome snapshot, which I uploaded to unstable.

• He also prepared the addition of a debug package, which I also sponsored after setting the Dm-Upload-Allowed field to yes since he’s doing a pretty good job already. It’s currently sitting in NEW accordingly.

• A while ago, Thibaut Girka requested the addition of an udeb for the libxtst library, it’s now sitting in NEW. Thibaut is working on a virtual on-screen keyboard, initially for use in the Graphical Installer for devices lacking a keyboard (but likely useful in other circumstances). Work is going on, stay tuned.

• Steve Langasek was kind enough to MultiArch-ify both libx11 and xorg; both were uploaded.

• Wayland is getting way more funnier than planned: it is now needed to get mesa built against wayland libraries (to get the wayland EGL platform), and the needed mesa bits are (last I asked) only in master for now.

• On the bugs side, I spent many hours pinging submitters and triaging bugs, mostly on the ati and intel video drivers, as well as on xorg-server again, along with the xorg meta package. (Clicking on a bug graph below leads to a cached full-year view.)
  

  x-x-video-ati	x-x-video-intel	xorg-server	xorg

• According to the UDD view of XSF bugs, and to Julien’s TXBW1, we went down from 880 bugs in november to 540 bugs now.