The X Window System is what most users might regard as "the real Unix". Although working on the Linux virtual consoles has already become quite comfortable with color support and Cut & Paste abilities, X is much more interesting for most people.
X for Linux/m68k is currently derived from XFree86 3.1.2, which is a
derivation of X11R6pl12 (read: X Window System Version 11, Release 6,
patchlevel 12).
It features all libraries, client programs and Xserver abilities you
are probably used to from other ports. Porting of X software to Linux/m68k
is as simple (or hard) as porting it to Linux/x86. Often, it's as simple
as unpacking an archive, typing xmkmf and make.
A lot of software that is not part of the X11R6 core distribution has
been compiled/ported by people from the Linux/m68k "team" and can be found
on the FTP servers listed in the FAQ, usually under a directory like
/pub/linux/680x0/X11R6. There are window managers, applications,
graphic programs, tools, and more. If you find a program that has not yet
been compiled by others, you might easily do it yourself.
Please note that this installation only contains "bare-bones" X11 - no famous clients (like xv, xpaint, Mosaic, fvwm or the like) are included. You will have to either compile those yourself or get pre-compiled binaries from the FTP servers mentioned in the FAQ. As far as pre-compiled binaries are concerned, these are usually tar'ed together so that you just have to unpack them from / to install everything in the right place.
Contrary to "bare bones" Linux with virtual consoles, X11R6 has vastly higher requirements, especially concerning main memory. A system with 8 MB RAM and 16 MB swap is to be regarded "smallest configuration". This will allow you to start the Xserver, a few small clients and get the feeling for it all.
If you plan to do serious work under X11, like recompiling kernels,
creating documents in LaTeX (and viewing the resulting .dvi/.ps
files) or image processing, you will need more main memory - the more
the better.
My current X11R6 installation occupies about 50 MBytes, including fonts, manuals and also quite a lot of other small tools. The X11 distribution I'll explain requires about 30 MBytes. You will need that much space on a Linux partition and also about 15 MBytes of temporary space on an AmigaOS partition to put the archives to. You can delete the archives after you have installed them.
You should have prepared your system for ELF, the Executable and Linker Format. The currently recommended X11R6 binary release is compiled in ELF, and so it requires the other libraries (libc, ..) to also be in ELF. The file ftp://tsx.mit.edu/pub/linux/680x0/ELF/README gives details about turning your Linux installation into an ELF system.
Older kernels (before 0.9pl7 or so) required that you add a kernel patch to make it ELF-compatible, but the more current kernels already have this built in, so you do not have to worry about that.
The "old" X11R6 release which was compiled by Martin Schaller and Roman
Hodek (most of this stuff is on tsx.mit.edu under
/pub/linux/680x0/X11R6/) is regarded somewhat "obsolete" although
there are a few binaries which you might need - and if this is the case,
you will also need the old X11R6 libraries. Installing them is not
explained here - all important programs should soon be available in
pre-compiled form as ELF binaries. If you have some X11 client which does
not run after you have performed the installation in this section, try
the following:
ldd <binaryname>
If this says something like
/usr/X11R6/bin/xterm: can't load library '/usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6'
Exec format error
or (if you had installed the old shared libraries)
libXt.so.6 (DLL Jump 6.0) => /usr/m68k-linuxaout/lib/libXt.so.6.0 libX11.so.6 (DLL Jump 6.0) => /usr/m68k-linuxaout/lib/libX11.so.6.0 (some more lines to appear here)
(important are the "DLL Jump" words) you know that this is a binary that was linked against the old a.out shared libraries, so you will need those old libraries to run this binary. Alternatively, you might want to get the sources to that program and compile it yourself in ELF.
Hm, well. Right now we still only have very little support for graphic boards.
I (Frank) have written a simple driver for the "Rainbow 3" board which almost noone has, but if you have one and are interested, mail me. This driver is not yet integrated into the kernel.
There is an upcoming driver for the Cybervision by Martin Apel and Torsten
Ebeling. Take a look at the FAQ for details (it's in the Under
Construction / Todo section).
Geert Uytterhoeven has written a pretty extensive driver for the AGA
chipset. This is not currently part of the kernel, but can be gotten
from his ftp site:
ftp://linux3.cc.kuleuven.ac.be/pub/Linux68k/
. The name should start
with amifb_*, where the rest of the name changes too often
to give it here.
You'll have to compile your own kernel to use these features.
As for the rest, you are (at the moment) limited to the built-in video hardware (ECS, OCS) in monochrome mode. Let's hope this will sooner or later change.
You will need quite a couple of archives for a complete installation; in particular, these are:
/dev (you could
also do this yourself manually, but it's probably easier to just unpack
an archive).Fortunately, almost all of these files can be found in the same place. Here is a list of FTP sites that carry them:
When this text was written, the files were not on tsx.mit.edu, for disk
space reasons. Once they get uploaded there, they will be under
/pub/linux/680x0/X11R6/X11R6pl12/.
The files you will need are (file sizes in brackets are for compressed files):
X11R6_950911_lib.tar.gz (shared libraries etc, 1.1 MB) X11R6_950911_servers.tar.gz (The Xserver program, 1.6 MB) X11R6_951009_bin.tar.gz (client programs, 1.6 MB) X11R6_950911_man.tar.gz (manual pages, 512 KBytes) X11R6_950911_fonts.tar.gz (fonts, 8 MB) X11R6_950911_include.tar.gz (include files, 300 KByte) X11R6_951009.readme X11R6_950911.readme (read these)
Look at the digits - don't get the wrong archives!
Put these onto an AmigaOS partition so that you can access them from
Linux. Alternatively, you can put them onto a tape and restore them to
a temporary location on a Linux (ext2) partition. This has the advantage
that unpacking the archives is faster than reading the data from an affs
partition (the current affs filesystem code is very slow for longer
files).
Furthermore, you will need the archive X-devices.tar.gz from
tsx.mit.edu
. By unpacking it you create some necessary
special files under /dev that provide the link between the X server
and the hardware device driver (which is in the kernel).
Finally, some X11 clients might require other Unix programs - e.g.
xrdb requires cpp to parse its input files. So, you should have
installed gcc (preferably version 2.7.0 (or above)), which contains cpp and
should have been part of your ELF installation process anyway.
Once you have all archives in a place accessible to Linux, you can install
them. For the most part, this is simply done by unpacking them from the
/ (root) directory.
If you are "upgrading" from an older X11 distribution, we recommend
removing/renaming all old files (or just the entire /usr/X11R6
directory). Mixing old and new files can lead to confusion.
Be sure to backup all config files you modified or added yourself - like
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/Xconfig (which is called XF86Config now
and resides in /etc), fvwm init files and the like. This
mostly concerns all files under /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/. If you
modified or added anything yourself in here, you will have to merge
together the new installation with your old files manually.
If you have enough disk space, you could e.g. just rename /usr/X11R6
to /usr/X11R6.not. If you now unpack the new distribution from
/, a new /usr/X11R6 will be created so that you could
even switch between the two installations simply by swapping their
directory names.
Please notice that old binaries (i.e. a.out binaries) also require the
corresponding a.out shared libraries. As the ELF installation suggested,
you should copy all *.o, *.a, *.so and *.sa files from library
directories (including /usr/X11R6/lib, which was not mentioned in
the ELF installation README) to /usr/m68k-linuxaout/lib/. Do not
delete them - your older X11 clients will most definitely require them.
You do not have to install all fonts again if you already had done so before, but if you are uncertain whether your previous installation of fonts was complete, you may want to just delete it and install the new (and hopefully complete :-) package. By the way, in the new distribution all fonts are stored in compressed format, which reduces the required disk space for them by a couple of MB.
Please also notice that you might have to add other shared libraries in
their ELF version. A good example is libXpm which quite a lot of
applications require. Check out the FTP servers mentioned in the FAQ
for precompiled binaries.
Keep in mind: As long as you use the old binaries (a.out), you do not need
ELF versions of the required shared libraries. Provided that the old
shared libraries are kept under /usr/m68k-linuxaout/lib/, all
old binaries will still work.
However, in the long term it makes sense to replace all binaries and
libraries with their ELF pendants to get rid of the fact that two copies
of the same library (namely in a.out and ELF format) are kept in
memory at the same time.
Ok, so go for it: Login as root and do:
cd /
tar xzvf <path_to_X11_archives>/X11R6_950911_lib.tar.gz
tar xzvf <path_to_X11_archives>/X11R6_951009_bin.tar.gz
tar xzvf <path_to_X11_archives>/X11R6_950911_man.tar.gz
tar xzvf <path_to_X11_archives>/X11R6_950911_servers.tar.gz
tar xzvf <path_to_X11_archives>/X11R6_950911_fonts.tar.gz
tar xzvf <path_to_X11_archives>/X11R6_950911_include.tar.gz
This already did most of the work for you. All files should have gone into
/usr/X11R6/ with the exception of /etc/XF86Config (the
XFree configuration file).
Now check if you have a "mouse" device node in /dev:
ls -l /dev/mouse
It should look like this:
crw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 10, 4 Nov 21 1994 /dev/mouse
If it's not yet there, do
cd /dev
mknod mouse c 10 4
Some more entries in /dev are required to allow communication
between the X server and the frame buffer driver (which is part of the
kernel). You could create these nodes manually or just unpack the
X-devices.tar.gz archive:
cd /
tar xzvf <path_to_X11_archives>/X-devices.tar.gz
This will create some special files in /dev that all start with "fb".
Don't be confused by the name; these sound very Atari-like, but the name
doesn't matter at all. If you don't like them, you are free to rename
them as long as you do not modify the major and minor device numbers of
these special files.
While we are in /dev: You need a free virtual console for the X
display. First there should be at least 8 virtual consoles in /dev,
named tty1 to tty8. If they are not there, do:
cd /dev; ./MAKEDEV tty<num>
and do the last line with <num> for all missing numbers between 1 and 8.
Even if you already have 8 virtual consoles, make sure that at least one
of them is unused - this means that no gettys should be running on it
and no program should currently use it for output (like syslogd).
If no console is available when trying to start X, the X server will not
be able to come up.
Next step is to create two symbolic links that will make life easier for you:
cd /usr/lib
ln -s /usr/X11R6/lib/X11 X11
cd /usr/include
ln -s /usr/X11R6/include/X11 X11
Ok, we're almost done. To enable the run-time linker to find the X11 shared libraries, put this line into the file /etc/ld.so.conf:
/usr/X11R6/lib
To activate this new search path for shared libraries, refresh the cache file:
ldconfig -v
You should now see that /usr/X11R6/lib and all shared libraries
in it are listed by ldconfig.
Well, that's all for the moment. Time for a real test. Log in as an
ordinary user and type startx. This should print some lines of
informational messages from the Xserver and then switch to a graphic
display with the X shaped mouse pointer in the middle of the screen.
After some time, some xterm terminal emulators and the twm
window manager should start up as initial applications.
To switch back to a text console, you have to type Ctrl-LAlt-Backspace
first and can then use LAlt-F<x> to switch to another virtual
console. The X display is on the first free console - so, if you have 8
virtual consoles and gettys running on the first 4, the X display will be on
virtual console number 5. Typing LAlt-F5 will take you back to the X
display.
To shut down X11, close all xterm programs and choose Exit from
the first menu of twm (left mouse button with mouse pointer on root
window).
Problems that could appear:
selection or gpm program running. See the
FAQ for explanations.
/dev (mouse, fb*).
See above.
/etc/ld.so.conf file. See above.
/etc/ld.so.cache file by running
ldconfig. See above.
"video=pal". Use "video=pal-lace" to boot in interlaced
mode. This would yield a resolution of 640x512 for X11. On ECS machines,
"video=multiscan" is probably the best idea.If you have a basic X11 system running, you will want to tailor it to your needs. This might include:
fvwm) or applications
(xv, xpaint, XFig..).
Just look around in the famous Linux/m68k FTP servers for pre-compiled
programs. Most just need to be unpacked from / and are ready to run.
/usr/X11R6/bin/X is a link to XF86_FBDev, which is a
pretty large Xserver with lots of drivers compiled in. If one of the
other X-servers is better for your needs, simply change the link:
cd /usr/X11R6/bin
rm X
ln -s XF86_<what_you_want> X
.xinitrc file in his home
directory. For a start, you might want to copy the system-wide xinitrc
file from /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc to
~user/.xinitrc and modify it then.
You might also want to configure xdm to automatically start X with an
X login prompt when the machine is booted; but explaining the configuration
of xdm goes beyond the scope of this installation guide.
~/.X11/lib/modmap) and read it into the Xserver with
xmodmap ~/.X11/lib/modmap
clear mod1 clear mod3 keycode 108 = Mode_switch add mod5 = Mode_switch keycode 109 = Alt_R add mod1 = Alt_R keycode 71 = 9 Prior keycode 39 = 3 Next keycode 8 = grave asciitilde keycode 103 = InsertPlease note that the numbers are very Amiga-specific, and I'm even not sure if they are correct for an A1200. For the Atari, they will probably be different; use
xev to find out the keycodes for your machine.
What this does:
LeftAlt key can be used just like on consoles to access
Latin-1 characters (like LeftAlt-r for "®").RightAlt key to switch from X11 to virtual
consoles (that is: Ctrl-RightAlt-Backspace).Shift-PgUp and Shift-PgDn (on the
keypad) work as expected: In xterm windows you can use them to
scroll back/forward.Shift-Help can be used to paste the
current selection (same function as middle mouse button, e. g. in
xterm windows).Next Chapter, Previous Chapter
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