Hi everyone,

after trying for quite some time to get xorg to run on my pc I have switched to trying to get xfree86 to work. Unfortunately, that won't cooperate either - at least I think it doesn't.

The problem is the following:
After 'make World' make goes ahead compiling in perfect harmony... until it gets stuck at the Xserver. in the hw subdirectory it tries to compile x86fscanpci.c; the result is that the compiler tremendously hogs up system resources (up to 1GB of swap!). The permanent i/o from swap makes the hdd almost inaccessible to other applications.

I know this behavior can't be normal. or is it?

did you know xfree86-4.7 was just recently released?

on the surface i would say no but if you are doing alot of other stuff while trying to compile x then ??

give it a shot and just let it run without using the machine.
gcc does alot of inlining with x and is creating alot of symbolic names and functions it is swapping around.

No, I didn't. Can I get it over git?

Although I can understand that compiling can be very demanding on system resources I would say that 440MB of RAM and 660MB of swap with just 0.4% of processor load (2.4 Celeron) is a bit out of the ordinary...
I turned of just about anything I could spare (include all sound support,network and crond down to the modules). I think I can't cut my system any more slack. after that, I let the compiler run over night (approx. 14 hours). It was still compiling the very same file after that time had ellapsed. I monitored my cpufreq to make sure that acpi didnt try to save power by throttling my CPU, which it didn't as it should have.

I have never seen something like this before...

/e I checked syslogd for error messages, too. nothing...

oh goodness no i didn't realise the scope of the problem.
your compiler is going wack. I had a little 90MHz desktop from the 80s that would do better at compiling x than that.
and you are using gcc on not an exotic platform how strange.
My guess is that the build of your gcc is tainted and broken in some way.
but it's just a guess.

i'm usin gcc 4.2.0. But i also tried installing the distros package and using that instead, but the result is still the same...

I'm going to get xfree-4.7 and try it again, just for the sake of it.

I confess that I don't know what to do. back to xorg (7.2) I guess. I am stuck at the Xserver (as usual...). There is a package dependency to a package called pixman-0.9.2. I know libpixman, which is part of the cairo library, but all I can find is 0.1.6. Apart from that libpixman doesn't install its header under (includeDir)/pixman/. Do you know a package called pixman or libpixman that has a similar version?

have you tried the simple sed fixes at the begining of this and using a config file on your 4.6 ?
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs...x/xfree86.html
be carefull with the lines about external libs if you don't have a full developement environment set up

I'm afraid that didn't help either. Damn! This is beginning to get really frustrating. I will try to get a binary package next, perhaps I'm missing something or am using an incorrect version that rpm can bicker about.

I'm afraid that didn't help either. I must be cursed, there's no other way to explain this.

What I'm gonna try next is installing a binary package. perhaps rpm will bicker about a version incoherence of a dependency or something similar...

ok, two things happened:

1) I installed a binary package of xfree86-4.6.0, which runs just fine. I am probably going to simply use it as is. This is the only way I am going to get an Xserver running on my pc.

2) I tried to compile 4.7.0. It gets stuck at exactly the same file, even with the patches installed...