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X.org Server

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Template:Infobox Software The X.Org Server (officially the X.Org Foundation Open Source Public Implementation of X11) is the X server in the official reference implementation of the X Window System. The current stable release is 1.5.0, which is part of X11R7.4, which was released on 10 September 2008<ref>X.Org Wiki - Releases/7.4</ref>. It is both open source and free software.

The project is supported and overseen by the X.Org Foundation and is hosted by freedesktop.org.

History

The modern X.Org Foundation came into being in 2004 when the body that oversaw X standards and published the official reference implementation joined forces with former XFree86 developers.

X11R6.7.0, the first version of the X.Org Server, was forked from XFree86 4.4 RC2. The immediate reason for the fork was a disagreement with the new license for the final release version of XFree86 4.4, but several disagreements among the contributors surfaced prior to the split. Many of the previous XFree86 developers have joined the X.Org Server project.

The X11R6.9.0/X11R7.0.0 release primarily added a modular build system based on the GNU Autotools. 6.9.0 used the old imake build system whereas 7.0.0 uses autotools, both on the same codebase. The modular path (using GNU Autotools) is however the future direction of the X.Org server, and also saw the X11 binaries moving out of their own /usr/X11R6 subdirectory tree and into the global /usr tree on many Unix systems.

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Adoption

The X.Org Server is increasingly popular with the free software Unix-like operating systems, being adopted in most Linux distributions and BSD variants, with the exception of NetBSD (although X.Org will be part of the base system in NetBSD 5.0<ref name="netbsd5">Template:Cite web</ref>). It is also included in Sun Microsystems' Solaris, and is the server of choice for x86 systems; SPARC-based systems almost exclusively use Sun Microsystems's proprietary Xsun server, as Sun graphics driver support for X.Org is very limited. It is also used in Cygwin/X, Cygwin's implementation of the X server for Microsoft Windows, and in Xming. Mac OS X versions prior to 10.5 ("Leopard") ship with an XFree86-based server, but 10.5's X server is based on the X.Org codebase.<ref>Re: Xorg in Leopard?</ref>