Information for Solaris : Notes for running Xorg on Solaris
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3. Notes for running Xorg on Solaris

  1. Depending on the release or architecture of Solaris you are running, you might need to install an OS driver for an aperture device.

    Under Solaris x86 2.5 and later, there's a system driver (/dev/xsvc) that provides this functionality. It will be detected automatically by the server, so you don't need to install the aperture driver.

    For older Solaris x86 and for Solaris SPARC releases, the source for this driver is included in xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/etc/apSolaris.shar of the source distribution. This file can usually also be found in the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/etc directory when Xorg is installed. Building, and installing the driver is relatively straight forward. Please read its accompanying README file.

  2. If you have not made the Virtual Terminal devices, you will need to specify the terminal device to run the Xserver on. The correct device is vt00 so your xinit command would look like so:

    	xinit -- vt00
    
    If you have made the virtual terminal devices you do not need to specify the VT to run the Xserver on.

  3. For old releases of Solaris you will probably want to set your LD_LIBRARY_PATH to /usr/X11R6/lib:/usr/openwin/lib:/usr/dt/lib. Including /usr/X11R6/lib in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH is probably not necessary, however it doesn't hurt. :)

    Including /usr/openwin/lib in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH is recommended on older releases because some Sun supplied binaries were not compiled with LD_RUN_PATH set properly at compile time.

    Motif and CDE applications may require /usr/dt/lib in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH too.

  4. Xqueue is NOT supported under Solaris. The includes necessary for Xqueue are available, however the driver does not seem to be in the kernel. (Go figure)
  5. If you want to use xdm with Solaris, extract the files from the shar file in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/etc/XdmConf.svr4 into a temporary directory. The README file tells where the individual files need to be installed. Be sure to read through each file and make any site-specific changes that you need.


Information for Solaris : Notes for running Xorg on Solaris
Previous: Notes for building X11R6.8 on Solaris
Next: Known bugs, and work arounds with Solaris