I am looking to install Xorg as opposed to xfree86 on my debian base (for no other reason than the experience).

I would prefer to use .deb packages if any are available (other than Unbuntu's Hoary Hedgehog)

I will compile from source ONLY if absoluteley necessary

Can anyone tell me if there are any debs in Debians unstable because I can't seem to find them.

When the above link mentions debian experimental, do they mean unstable?

How do I go about installing X.org - do I need Xfree86?

Everywhere I have come across talks about "upgrading" or "switching" from one to the other, whereas I have no X layer at all.

Cheers

You should be able to install Xorg without anything like XFree86 on your system. Everyone used to use XFree but because of something with licensing everyone migrated to Xorg. Have tried installing Xorg with apt-get?
Also, although compiling from code might take a bit longer it isn't terribly hard and can be good expierence.

X.org isn't in the debian repositories yet. I hear it'll be in SID soon don't know when though. Might be worth waiting so you don't have to compile it all by hand as it'll probably save you later from errors cause it's not recognized by apt. But it's your call you can compile it now but it's probably better to wait till it's in apt officialy or use a distro that uses it already

swat I thought. I will attempt to go down the route of using the Ubuntu debs for it though.

Hello
Ifuond this, is shood work.
1. Add these sources to your /etc/apt/sources.list (It doesnt matter if you run sid or not)

deb http://debian.linux-systeme.com sid main
deb-src http://debian.linux-systeme.com sid main

2. # apt-get update

3. Kill X. (ctrl+alt+backspacel or if your running gdm, ctrl+alt+f1, type killall -9 gdm, and hit enter, then Kill X using method above)

3. # apt-get install xserver-xorg

4. Reinstall/Install any nvidia/ati drivers etc. (Don't worry about your X config files, it copies your XF86Config-4 over to xorg.conf.)

5. # gdm

6. check everything has been installed properly, run X -version in the terminal, and it should produce something similar to this:

X Window System Version 6.8.2 (Debian 6.8.2-7 20050329134343 root@codeman.linux-systeme.org)
Release Date: 9 February 2005
X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0, Release 6.8.2
Build Operating System: Linux 2.4.20-wolk4.18s i686 [ELF]
Current Operating System: Linux linux 2.6.8-2-386 #1 Thu May 19 17:40:50 JST 2005 i686
Build Date: 29 March 2005
Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.X.Org
to make sure that you have the latest version.
Module Loader present
OS Kernel: Linux version 2.6.8-2-386 (horms@tabatha.lab.ultramonkey.org) (gcc version 3.3.5 (Debian 1:3.3.5-12)) #1 Thu May 19 17:40:50 JST 2005 T

--------------------------

(Optional)

6. Install additional packages such as libxcomposite, xcompmgr and transset to produce composite effects.

7. # apt-get install libxcomposite1 xcompmgr transset

That's it, if I've missed something please feel free to point it out.
Thanks to Red Jam
Bertil

ta.

There are some more repositories with x.org from apt-get.org should you need the choice:

apt-get.org search results for xorg

Thank Ye

*Bows*

Now it's more than that, Xorg has features that XFree doesn't like real transparency for example. They are others like better hadware recognition I think, but there I'm not sure. Please look at the X.org website for more informations.

Edit> The Xfree86 server that is installed on Debian from the official repository contains Xorg backported source codes. It's time for Debian to move on and to get Xorg as a default X server!

This is a very nice resource page. I just wanted to add that I was test installing a minimal Debian Sarge setup, and I was able to include Xorg as the default window system by dropping to a command prompt after the initial boot, adding the linux-systeme repos to the sources.list, apt-get updating, and then issuing the command below.

This way I never had to remove or update Xfree and could start off a clean install with Xorg already waiting for my first GUI login.