3. Summary of new features in 6.7.0.

This is a sampling of the new features in X11R6.7.0. A more complete list of changes can be found in the CHANGELOG that is part of the X source tree.

3.1. Enhancements in X11R6.7.0 beyond XFree86 4.4RC2

• The final version of the X11R6.7 versions of the X Window System standards and specification documents are included. Updates since X11R6.6 include a small correction to the numbering of requests in the Shape Extension Protocol specification; the addition of IPv6 support to the X11 Protocol, Xlib, XDMCP, and Session Manager specifications; and the addition of the ServerInterpreted Host family to the X11 Protocol and Xlib specifications.
• IPv6 support updated to the final X11R6.7 versions of the standards, including the addition of the ServerInterpreted Host family for xhost style authentication. See the IPv6 section below for further details.
• Only files without the new XFree86 1.1 license are included in the X11R6.7.0 release. Additionally, X.Org will be attempting, when possible, to contact copyright holders of material in the distribution when those copyrights do not follow the Debian Free Software guidelines to see if they can be relicensed to adhere to those standards.
• Trademark law requires that there be no ambiguity about the use of a trademark, so the documentation, error message, name of the X executable, configuration file name, etc., have all been changed to avoid confusion of X.Org's implementation with the XFree86[tm] trademarked implementation. Some of the changes made include:
  • The name of the X server is Xorg, rather than XFree86.
  • The name of the X server configuration file is /etc/X11/xorg.conf rather than /etc/X11/XF86Config. If xorg.conf does not exist, the server will look for the old name.
  • The config file and servername in xorg.cf is build time configurable.
  • The vendor string was updated to "X.Org Foundation".
  • The X server's log file name was changed to Xorg.?.log.
  • xf86cfg was renamed xorgcfg.
  • xf86config was renamed xorgconfig.
  • All messages emitted by the server in the log were updated to reflect the change in name.
  • The module loader was modified to accept either XFree86 generated modules or X.Org generated modules.
  • Manual pages and other documentation was updated.
• Projective affine transforms and the trapezoid primitives were implemented in XFree86 4.3 with suboptimal performance. Work is underway to accelerate these primitives. The render extension and render library in XFree86 4.4 are stale and were updated to version 0.8.4 in X11R6.7.0 to fix a number of bugs, by a backport from the modular X window system tree. The bugs fixed include checks for X servers not implementing render properly (e.g. Solaris X servers which advertized support for render but failed to support 1, 4, 8, 24, 32 depth pixmaps.) and eliminating an unneeded dependence on libXext.
• Fontconfig will no longer be installed by default since that has often/usually resulted in overwriting more recent versions. The fontconfig version 2.2.2 shipped in X11R6.7.0 needs to be built to allow programs in the tree to build that depend on it, but those programs will run fine using installed versions of fontconfig. If you do want to install the version shipped in X11R6.7.0 add:

   #define InstallFontconfigLibrary YES
  

  to your host.def. We recommend instead if you need to install a current fontconfig version, to get the current version from fontconfig.org.
• Freetype was updated to version 2.1.7. But installing freetype from X distributions would often or usually result in the replacement or use of "stale" versions of freetype. On Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris 10, and SCO5, therefore, X11R6.7.0 will by default use the version of freetype2 that is installed on the system. If your system doesn't come with an installed freetype2 and you wish to use the version supplied with this distribution, please add:

    #define HasFreetype2 NO 
  

  to config/cf/host.def. Additonally, the default font renderer for TrueType that is loaded by the X server was changed to freetype.
• During the build, the version of expat that is installed on the system is used by default on Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, Linux and SCO5. If your system doesn't come with an installed expat and you wish to use the version supplied with this tree please add:

   #define HasExpat NO 
  

  to config/cf/host.def. Libexpat's web site has current versions.
• During build the version of zlib that is installed on the system is used by default on OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Mac OS (Darwin), Microsoft Windows (Cygwin), Linux, Sun Solaris, and SCO5. If your system doesn't come with an installed zlib and you wish to use the version supplied with this tree please add:

  #define HasZlib NO 
  

  to config/cf/host.def. Zlib's web site has current versions of zlib.
• You are likely to need the ncurses and libpng libraries including the development header files. Builds will also require groff, flex, and optionally, perl5.
• The TinyX (kdrive) driver was removed entirely from the tree in X11R6.7.0. The version in XFree86 4.4 was 15 months out of date as of XFree86 4.4's release in February 2004, and is not supported in the monolithic Xorg X server tree. Please turn to freedesktop.org's X Server project for current kdrive support, including the new composite, damage, and X fixes extension under development.
• Xft was updated to version 2.1.5, to fix bugs with Freetype compatibility.
• The remains of XIE and PEX extensions were removed completely. Similarly, libxml2's remains were removed, as it is not used at all in the distribution.
• The new fonttosfnt utility to convert .bdf/.pcf fonts to .ttf format was removed as it is not yet ready and working. Please turn to freedesktop.org's X Applications for a newer version.
• Allow left and right modifier keys to be distinguished on Mac OS X 10.3. (Does not work on earlier versions.)

3.2. Summary of new features in Cygwin/X

This is a sampling of the new features in Cygwin/X in X11R6.7.0.

3.2.1. Cygwin/X Notes

Cygwin/X has continued its rapid pace of development that it has sustained since Spring 2001 and this release shows it, we now have: a stable and fast multi-window mode, seamless clipboard integration, a configurable tray menu icon, popups on error messages pointing users to the log file and our mailing list, the beginnings of indirect 3D acceleration for OpenGL applications, improved non-US keyboard and clipboard support, and only a handful of bugs that continue to be reported.

Between the XFree86 4.3.0 release and the X.Org X116.7 release the Cygwin/XFree86 project broke away from The XFree86 Project, Inc. due to a lack of support from the XFree86 project. As such, the Cygwin/XFree86 project was renamed to the Cygwin/X project and the upstream source code tree that Cygwin/X pulls from and pushes to is now the tree managed by the X.Org Foundation. The Cygwin/X project has seen a rush of development and interest in the project since the split; one metric showing this is that the number of CVS committers we have has gone from zero to six.

3.2.2. Cygwin/X-specific Changes

[Note: This list is by no means complete and covers issues that were either specific to the Cygwin/X DDX or were reported as problems by a number of Cygwin/X users, thus creating an interest in such a problem being fixed. The complete Cygwin/X-specific change logs can be seen at http://x.cygwin.com/devel/server/changelog-full.html]

• Major multi-window mode performance improvements and bug fixes. (Takuma Murakami, Earle F. Philhower III)
• Initial version of indirect 3D acceleration by mapping GLX to Win32's OpenGL implementation. (Alexander Gottwald, Harold L Hunt II)
• Allow clipboard integration to work seamlessly with Xdmcp. (Harold L Hunt II)
• Fix clipboard integration to stop stealing ownership of the selection X (caused text to be unhighlighted in emacs, xterm, etc.). (Harold L Hunt II)
• Improved Japanese keyboard and clipboard support.(Kensuke Matsuzaki, Takuma Murakami, Alexander Gottwald)
• Customizable tray menu icon allowing shortcuts to start programs, etc.(Earle F. Philhower III)
• Add an About Cygwin/X dialog box to the tray icon menu. (Harold L Hunt II)
• Fix crash with 24 bpp icons. (Fabrizio Gennari)
• Improve window positioning in multi-window mode.(Earle F. Philhower III)
• Allow overriding the tray icon in the .XWinrc preferences file.(Earle F. Philhower III)
• New icons.(Jehan Bing, Michael Bax, Benjamin Rienfenstahl)
• Fix some multi-monitor problems.(Takuma Murakami)
• Prevent multiple instances of XWin.exe listening on the same display number. (Takuma Murakami, Harold L Hunt II)
• Present user with a dialog box containing useful information when FatalError is called. (Harold L Hunt II)
• Make the multi-window mode window manager detectable by other window managers such as twm. (Takuma Murakami)
• Center dialog boxes in the desktop window. (Earle F. Philhower III)
• Fix multi-window mode crashes when there were multiple instances of XWin.exe. (Kensuke Matsuzaki)
• Don't send localhost and 0.0.0.0 when making Xdmcp connections. (Matthieu Herrb, Harold L Hunt II)
• Fix repeated key strokes. (Ivan Pascal)
• Fix synchronization of mode key states between X and Win32. (Takuma Murakami)
• Enable remapping of mouse buttons. (Takuma Murakami)
• Enable copying and pasting of non-ascii characters in Windows 95/98/Me. (Kensuke Matsuzaki)
• Fix multiple crashes in the clipboard code. (Kensuke Matsuzaki, Harold L Hunt II)
• Automatic keyboard layouts for the most frequently used keyboard layouts. (Alexander Gottwald)
• Fix problem with TweakUI's focus-follows-mouse behavior. (Harold L Hunt II)
• Fix problem with TweakUI's and the AltGr key. (Harold L Hunt II)
• Built in SHM support with detection of the SHM engine (cygserver). (Ralf Habacker, Harold L Hunt II)
• expat, freetype2, fontconfig, libXft, and xterm are now built and distributed separately from the monolithic packages. (Gerrit P. Haase, Harold L Hunt II, Alexander Gottwald, Nicholas Wourms)
• Merged in work on the NativeGDI engine. (Alan Hourihane)

3.3. Video Driver Enhancements

• Several stability issues with the support for the Intel 830M, 845G, 852GM, 855GM and 865G integrated graphics chipsets have been fixed. Some limitations related to the driver's use of the video BIOS remain, especially for some laptops.
• The nv driver for NVIDIA cards has been updated as follows:
  • Support added to the nv driver for the GeForce FX 5700, which didn't work with XFree86 4.3.
  • The driver now does a much better job of auto-detecting which connector of dual output cards the monitor is attached to, and this should reduce or eliminate the need for manual xorg.conf overrides.
  • The 2D acceleration for TNT and GeForce has been completely rewritten and its performance should be substantially improved.
  • TNT and GeForce cards have a new Xv PutImage adaptor which does scaled YUV bit blits.
• The SiS driver has seen major updates, including:
  • Support for 661/741/760 and support for 330 (Xabre).
  • Merged Framebuffer mode.
  • Support for DVI, and much more.
  • DRI for 300 series (300/305, 540, 630, 730) is supported again.
• A new driver for several VIA integrated graphics chipsets has been added.
• Various updates and bug fixes have been made to most other drivers.

3.4. Input Driver Enhancements

• The mouse driver has some support on Linux and FreeBSD for auto-detecting which device node to use. This makes it unnecessary to supply this information in the xorg.conf file in most cases.

3.5. IPv6 support

X11R6.7.0 supports IPv6, based on the code contributed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. to X.Org. See X.Org's document for a detailed list of what these changes are and how your system is affected by them.

Note that in most environments script kiddies have generated sniffer scripts that will easily grab passwords on a network. By default, therefore, many software vendors now ship X with remote access disabled.

Unless you are confident of your network, direct use of IPv6 (or, for that matter, IPv4) over the network to your X server is not recommended; instead, we recommend the use of ssh ("ssh -X -C") to provide strong cryptography (and possibly compression) for network transparent use of X. Work is beginning to address this with a more fully integrated encryption scheme that would avoid the extra process context switches and improve performance over ssh (how much is unknown).

3.5.1. Protocol names and aliases.

• tcp is an alias for both IPv6 and IPv4 transports.
• inet specifies IPv4 only.
• inet6 specifies IPv6 only.

You can force the X server to only listen to IPv4 connections with the X -nolisten inet6 command or you can force a IPv6 connection by setting DISPLAY to inet6/host:0.

3.5.2. XDM

The IPv6 XDMCP code is not enabled by default on platforms that don't support binding a IPv6 socket to a IPv4 address.

The XDM-AUTHORIZATION-1 authentication scheme does not support IPv6 addresses but a new release of the protocol, XDM-AUTHORIZATION-2 has been designed; this though is yet to be implemented. By default builds do not enable the XDM-AUTHORIZATION-1 code.

3.5.3. ServerInterpreted host authentication

The ServerInterpreted host family was added in response to comments received during the X11 over IPv6 standards public review period. This family allows registration of new subtypes and implementation of them by modifications solely to the X server, without having to modify clients such as xhost or the Xlib or X protocol standards. In the initial X11R6.7.0 release, two subtypes are supported - "hostname" for hostnames resolved by the server at connection time to better support dynamic DNS & mobile IP, and "ipv6" to allow IPv6 literal addresses, including in the future, scoped addresses. For more information on these features, see the xhost manual page, X11 Protocol and Xlib standards, and the documents in xc/doc/specs/SIAddresses.

3.6. X Server and Extension Updates

• The Mesa version used for OpenGL® 1.3 and DRI driver support has been updated to 5.0.2.

3.7. Client and Library Updates

3.7.1. Xterm

The user-visible changes to xterm since XFree86 4.3 are:

Bug Fixes:

• Make signalInhibit resource work, i.e., disable the menu entries that would send signals to, or exit xterm.
• Make cursor definition in tek4014 emulation work as originally implemented.
• Modify translations for scrollbar so that one can use shifted pageup, wheel mouse, etc., while the mouse pointer is over the scrollbar.
• Correct initialization of G1 character set mapping.

New Features:

• Modify the predictable version of the generated logfile name to append the process-id rather than a random value.
• Modify scroll-back and scroll-forw actions to accept an adjustment value, e.g.,

  scroll-back(1, page-2)
  

  to scroll back by 2 lines less than a page.
• Add visualBellDelay resource to modify the length of time used for visual bell, for very slow displays or very fast computers.

Improved Locale Support:

• modify uxterm script to strip modifiers such as "@euro" from the locale setting before adding ".UTF-8".
• Add logic to wide-character support which attempts to load fonts specified by utf8Fonts subresources at startup. The subresources have the same names as the fonts which they replace, e.g., font, font1, etc., so that the ISO-10646-1 fonts can be specified in the XTerm app-defaults file.
• Improved performance with chinput application.

Improved Font Handling:

• Document in xterm's manual page how to use XFree86 ":unscaled" keyword to suppress scaling of bold fonts.
• Improved logic for deriving bold fontname from normal fontname.
• Make double-width characters work with -u8 option.
• Updated table of Unicode line-drawing characters.
• Several fixes for rendering using Xft (option -fa):
  • Make height of TrueType fonts match ascent+descent.
  • Translate Unicode values (from UTF-8 output to xterm) for line-drawing to xterm's internal code, etc., since TrueType fonts generally do not have either set of line-drawing glyphs. xterm can draw these directly.
  • Pass 16-bit values rather than 8-bit values to xtermXftDrawString() to allow for wide-characters.
  • Use built-in line-drawing characters for Xft fonts.
  • Implement underlining.
• Implement boldMode for wide-characters.
• Modified to work with CJK double-width (bi-width/monospace) fonts.

Workarounds for Special Applications:

• Add option -k8 and resource allowC1Printable to allow users of non-VTxxx character sets such as KOI-8 to treat the C1 control area (character codes 128-159) as printable rather than control characters.
• Add configure option --enable-broken-st and resource brokenStringTerm to allow user to revert one part of the parsing table corrections.
• Add configure option --enable-broken-osc and resource brokenLinuxOSC to accommodate scripts which do not distinguish between running in the Linux console and running in X. Linux console recognizes malformed control strings which start with an OSC, but are fixed-length, with no terminator.
• Add configure option --enable-pty-handshake to allow one to compile-in support for the pty handshaking logic, and resource ptyHandshake to enable or disable it. This feature is normally enabled.

Modified Resources:

• Change color4 to "dodger blue", since this provides better contrast.
• Remove color resources from XTerm.ad, leaving them only in XTerm-col.ad
• Modify UXTerm.ad resource file to include "XTerm-color" rather than "XTerm", in case the latter file contains no color resource definitions.
• Changed class of veryBoldColors to VeryBoldColors, since ColorMode is associated with boolean resources.
• Changed classes of colorBDMode and similar resources that override colors when a video attribute is set to ColorAttrMode, to make them distinct from ColorMode. This avoids an unexpected rendering of reverse video, for example.

Modified terminfo/termcap entries:

• Add indp and rin to terminfo entry.
• Add le to termcap xterm-basic entry. Though missing from older termcaps for xterm, some applications check for it.
• Correct AF/AB strings in termcap for xterm-256color and xterm-88color entries.

3.8. I18N and Font Updates

• The "freetype" X server font backend has been updated by the After X-TT Project to include the functionality previously provided by the "xtt" backend, and to fix some bugs. The "xtt" backend will be dropped in the next release in favour of the updated unified "freetype" backend.
  • The new "freetype" backend has the improved "very lazy" metric calculation method which enables super-fast loading of proportional CJKV fonts.
  • All of the servers, including xfs, Xnest, Xprt, Xvfb, the Cygwin-X server (as well as the Xorg server) can handle the perfect TTCap options.
• The Compose file processing mechanism has been improved and made more flexible. See the Xlib Compose file support and extensions section below.
• The Bitstream Vera TrueType fonts that Bitstream, Inc donated to the GNOME Foundation have been included with this release.

3.9. OS Support Updates

• On Mac OS X, the appropriate backend drawing code is now dynamically loaded at runtime which reduces the X server's memory footprint. In rootless mode, Apple's Xplugin library is used where available. (Xplugin is included as part of Mac OS X on Panther.) With Xplugin, XDarwin provides identical performance to Apple's X11, including the following improvements over 4.3:
  • Added direct GLX rendering with thread support.
  • Faster 2-D drawing.
  • Added support for the Apple-WM extension so XDarwin interoperates with quartz-wm.
• On Darwin, IOKit mode now uses shadowfb for much faster drawing.
• Various GNU/Hurd support updates.
• Experimental support added for GNU/KFreeBSD and GNU/KNetBSD systems.
• SCO OpenServer support updates. X11R6.7 now works on Release 5.0.7 with Maintenance Pack 1, or on prior releases through Release 5.0.4. Please consult the README.SCO file for details.