Migrating to Modular X HOWTO

? ? Migrating to Modular X

Introduction =20

To keep old packages from getting in the way, we're going to clean out all = the old xorg-x11 cruft before installing modular X. This isn't absolutely cruci= al, but it will help ensure a smooth migration.

First step: clean out your old X =20

Before you start, make sure you have a package of the old, monolithic xorg-= x11 built with USE=3Ddlloader if the dlloader flag was available = in that version. It's not available in >=3D6.8.99.15.

# emerge gentoolkit
# quickpkg xorg-x11

Get rid of the monolithic installation:

# emerge -Ca xorg-x11
# rm -rf /usr/lib/opengl/xorg-x11
# rm -rf /usr/lib/libGL*

You definitely want a backup copy of the monolithic xorg-x11 so you can mix= and match parts if desired.

The later steps are helpful in getting rid of symlinks created by=20 opengl-update.

If your /usr/X11R6 isn't a symlink to /usr, delet= e it and start from scratch. But first, save a list of all the packages installi= ng there.

# if [[ ! -L /usr/X11R6 ]]; \
	then equery belongs /usr/X11R6 > usr-x11r6-packages \
	&& rm -rf /usr/X11R6; fi

Second step: Installing modular X =20

=46irst, add the required packages to /etc/portage/package.unmask. Open /usr/portage/profiles/package.mask in your text editor of choice, then copy and paste the full modular X mask over to package.unmask. Do the same with package.keywords= if you're running stable.

=46or direct rendering, you'll want to activate the dri USE flag.

Now, install the metabuild. This will install the server and popular applications, giving you a working desktop implementation of X:

# emerge xorg-x11

Note that this install tries to be rather minimal, so things like xcursor-t= hemes are not installed by default.

Next, install some drivers. This will vary depending on your input and video hardware, so take a look in /usr/portage/x11-drivers/. Here's a sample:

# emerge xf86-input-mouse xf86-input-keyboard xf86-video-ati

With modular installed, external drivers such as nvidia-glx and wacom as we= ll as some vnc apps may not work if they install things to /usr/lib/modules instead of /usr/lib/xorg/modules. Many of these will have modular X detection added to the installation proce= ss and thus will need to be re-merged after modular X install.

Caveats/Common Problems

'emerge -u world' wants to install xorg-x11

This is because the tree isn't fixed for modular dependencies yet. You can = help the porting effort by reading http://dev.gentoo.org/~spyderous/xorg-x11/porting_to_modular_x_howto.t= xt and filing bugs with patches to the individual package maintainers. The=20 maintainers will be listed in metadata.xml in the same directory as the pac= kage, and the 'herdstat' package will speed up querying for them.

Driver problems

I've had reports that:

ati won't start X
- But it works fine on my FireGL 8800
- Resolved by moving /usr/lib/xorg/modules/multimedia ou= t of the way
vesa locks up box with an mga card
vga produces a very weird-looking screen, divided into quarters

Getting glxinfo/glxgears

The best way to deal with this is undecided by upstream so far, so there's = an ebuild in my overlay contributed by cardoe. Alternately, you can build them= by hand.

Option 1:=20 http://dev.gentoo.org/~spyderous/overlay/x11-misc/glx-utils/

I'm not going to tell you how to use an overlay, so if you don't know and a= re too lazy to read the docs, use option 2.

Option 2: Build by hand

# emerge freeglut
# tar zxvf /usr/portage/distfiles/Mesa-6.3.1.1.tar.gz
# cd Mesa-6.3.1.1/configs
# ln -s linux-dri-x86 current
# cd ../progs/xdemos
# make glxinfo
# make glxgears
# cp glxinfo glxgears /usr/bin/

To get some debugging info from glxinfo to help in getting direct rendering working:

# LIBGL_DEBUG=3Dverbose glxinfo

Mouse protocol autodetection

If you have Protocol "auto" set in xorg.conf for your mouse, it may = not work. You may need to specify Protocol "ExplorerPS/2" or "IMPS/2"= for your wheel to work.

Where are imake/xmkmf?

These are now in the tree. However, gccmakedep is not modularized yet and thus the imake build system is still broken for some packages.

Everything in /usr/lib/xorg disappeared!

Remerge >=3Dxorg-server-0.99.1-r4. This was a temporary bug in the ebuil= d that=20 resulted in deletion after removal of a package. Instead,=20 /usr/lib/xorg should have only been deleted when no xorg-server remained on the system.

gdm/kdm don't work

If you installed modular X on a fresh Gentoo installation, you may not have= a=20 /usr/X11R6 -> /usr symlink. Try creating one; = no ebuild does yet.

You can help get things out of /usr/X11R6 by fixing the packag= es that do it and filing bugs.

Other Issues

The trap module will give errors on starting X, because the modular xorg-server doesn't build it yet. You may want to copy it over from your old X installation.
Make sure your xorg.conf doesn't list ModulePath, because this directory changed from /usr/lib/modules to /usr/lib/xorg/modules.