A year ago I installed Red Hat 5.2 on my PC and had problems with XFree86. On this board, I don't care if MetroX or AcceleratedX are good, because they aren't owned or distributed by the company we're all considering investing in, and because the "product" sold by Red Hat, as is, has some problems with X Windows. People who buy Red Hat at CompUSA get a box and they expect the stuff in the box to be all they need to have a full on functional Linux set up.
Here's hoping Red Hat takes some of their new $90,000,000 (love them zeroes) and pays someone to work in XFree86 or redo it the right way. Heck, they might even be able to just purchase another X Server.
What would happen if Red Hat owned AcceleratedX and *didn't* GPL it? The Red Hat Linux product would be better, and it'd give Red Hat are real difference between it's Linux, the competiton's Linux, and the GPL distrubition of Red Hat that Cheap Byte's sells for $1.99. I could see Dell paying Red Hat if they could use a commercial X Server instead of XFree86.
---matt
(For the non-geeks: Linux looks like windows by putting a bunch on things on top of one another. You get a Window Manager that decides how everything looks, running on top of an X-Server that provides GUI functionality, running on top of the Linux Kernel. XFree86 is the X-Server that comes with most Linuxen, mostly because it's free. |
