[Mageia-dev] Deprecating startx

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Colin Guthrie at 07/03/12 09:26 did gyre and gimble:
> Hi,
> 
> Unless someone comes along and does a reasonable amount of coding before
> mga2, I think we'll have to deprecate supporting startx (it can still be
> used in some circumstances, but audio and accelerated graphics will not
> be available).
> 
> See this comment (and the link therein) for more info on the issue:
> https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4652#c9

OK, so there is some good news on this issue.

After discussing this upstream and poking some Fedora folks, they came
up with a very simple and nice way of keeping 95% of the startx behaviour.

Simply patch it to use the argument -novtswitch when starting X

This would basically "temporarily convert" the text session to a
graphical one. There will be a couple of quirks but at least all devices
and such will work as before.

There are some drawbacks. Running startx over ssh will not work, but
then it wasn't ever officially supported anyway and was full of quirks.
I believe this will be detected and specifically disabled now.

Also you won't be able to "switch back" to the text console and look at
the output from the X server. This is easily enough worked around
however ("startx >x.log 2>&1" then just look at the x.log inside X or a
second text terminal).

If no one has a problem, I'll look to include the patch.

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
colin(at)mageia.org
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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