Re: [gentoo-user] What xorg pkgs needed for X to work

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Friday 15 January 2010 20:43:32 Harry Putnam wrote:
> [Please excuse if this is a double whammy... it appears not to have
> made it to the mail/news server]
> 
> Sorry for the awkwardly phrased subject... but couldn't think of
> anything better.
> 
> I'm rebuilding my home desktop with a full reinstall
> 
> So far haven't gotten to getting X working... but did notice that when
> I test what all gets installed with:
> 
>   emerge -vp xfce4-meta
> 
> I notice that xorg-x11 is not amongst the... dependencies.
> 
> xorg-server is absent as well, but I seem to recall a more basic xorg
> pkgs being involved.  Maybe something like xorg-base... or whatever.
> 
> Apparently something has happened with naming of pkgs or something,
> that I haven't kept up with.
> 
> But can a user really get use out of xfce4-meta with no xorg-server?

Yes.

This is how X11 works. xfce does not need a full blown xserver on the *local* 
machine, it simply needs X libs to function. The X libs in turn will talk to 
the xserver, which does not have to be on the local machine.

Parallel situation: You do not need X and a browser on a machine running a web 
server, as the pages served are not necessarily viewed on the machine hosting 
apache.

To get X you can either;

merge xorg-x11 (this is the "meta" package you didn't know the name of) or
put "X" in USE

Note carefully that this is not a silly situation, it works this way by 
design.

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com