Running Linux, Fourth Edition

Installing XFree86

You can find the Linux binary distribution of XFree86 on a number of FTP sites. On ftp://ftp.xfree86.org, you can find it in the directory /pub/XFree86/4.2.0/binaries; there you will find systems for various architectures in subdirectories. (At the time of this writing, the current version is 4.2.0; newer versions are released periodically.)

It’s quite likely you obtained XFree86 as part of a Linux distribution, in which case downloading the software separately is not necessary. If you are downloading XFree86 directly, see Tables 10.1 and 10.2, which list the files in the XFree86-4.2.0 distribution.

In order to find out the set of files you need to download, we highly advise that you download a small shell script called Xinstall.sh first and run it as follows:

            sh Xinstall.sh -check

This will output the directory containing the set of binaries you need to download.

Table 10-1 lists the required files.

Table 10-1. Files required for installing XFree86

File	Description
Xinstall.sh	The installation program
extract	An unpacking utility
Xbin.tgz	X clients and utilities as well as the run-time libraries
Xlib.tgz	Datafiles needed at runtime
Xman.tgz	Manual pages
Xdoc.tgz	Documentation
Xfnts.tgz	The base font set
Xfenc.tgz	The base set of font encoding data
Xetc.tgz	Runtime configuration files
Xvar.tgz	Runtime data
Xxserv.tgz	The X server itself
Xmod.tgz	The various driver modules

There are also a number of optional ...