[Mageia-dev] Deprecating startx

Fri Mar 9 00:58:11 CET 2012

'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/
+
+Day Job:
+  Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/
+Open Source:
+  Mageia Contributor http://www.mageia.org/
+  PulseAudio Hacker http://www.pulseaudio.org/
+  Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/
+