Xvesa, Xfbdev, & Xi810

Forum: X and Fluxbox
Topic: Xvesa, Xfbdev, & Xi810
started by: clacker

Posted by clacker on Oct. 25 2005,13:43

There was a discussion in the 2.0RC1 topic about using an Xi810 tinyX server in dsl. I've don't have this card, but I got curious and decided to try loading Xvesa and Xfbdev from XFreee86 to see if I could get them to load. I got the new binaries for Xvesa running, but I'm having a permission problem and I could use some advice. What I've done only works with startx run from root.

I downloaded these 14 files from < http://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/XFree86/4.5.0/binaries/Linux-ix86-glibc20/ > and placed them in the /home/dsl directory.

Code Sample

Xbin.tgz
Xdoc.tgz
Xetc.tgz
Xfenc.tgz
Xfnts.tgz
Xinstall.sh
Xlib.tgz
Xman.tgz
Xmod.tgz
Xrc.tgz
Xtinyx.tgz
Xvar.tgz
Xxserv.tgz
extract

The first things I did were to make the system writeable. I had to exit the window manager (you don't want to be in X when your writing over it). Everything I did was run from a liveCD of 2.0RC1. I had to remove /usr/bin/X11 becuse it wasn't updating when /usr/X11R6/bin was. I add the link back later. I also had to move /etc onto the ramdisk because all of the additions from XFree86 filled it up so there was no more room on /dev/ram0:

Code Sample

sudo su
cp /etc /ramdisk/etc
cp -r /etc /ramdisk/etc
rm -r /etc
ln -s /ramdisk/etc /etc
/etc/init.d/mkwriteable
rm /usr/bin/X11
exit

Then I ran the Xinstall.sh script. I had to make it and extract executable, but I downloaded it using windows so if you get it through dsl they might already be.

Code Sample

sudo ./Xinstall.sh
# yes to continue
# yes to continue
# yes to overwrite app-default config files
# no to overwrite fonts.conf
# no to overwrite fonts.dtd
# yes to install tiny servers
# no to new xterm terminfo
# yes to libGL links
# no to link rstarted

Then I did did a little more and tried it out:

Code Sample

vi .xserverrc
# removed the &>/dev/null at the end so error messages are visible
sudo ln -s /usr/X11R6/bin /usr/bin/X11
# added back the link for /usr/bin/X11
startx
# got an error when running startx as user dsl
# Fatal Server error:
# LinuxInit: Server must be suid root
sudo startx
#this worked!

Why does startx want to run as root? I'm sure it's just a permission or an owner somewhere, but I'm not seeing it.