I’m very excited… after a few days worth of work and the invaluable help of the openSUSE community, I finally managed to boot up my virtual machine, running openSUSE 12.2M3 and have X.org 1.12.1 running on it.

So why am I so happy? It resolves a nasty bug the gnome-team was trying to chase, namely the fact that keyboard shortcuts stopped working a while back. Once the issue was identified (the obvious switch from XInput to XInput2 by gnome upstream), there were two solutions: revert XInput2 usage in gnome or get X up-to-date and live happily ever after.

Needless to say, we chose the hard way and started working on the X.org packages.Now, they were solid, but packaging wise everything bug in good shape. A lot of patches applied, many of them not part of the upstream codebase, never sent upstream, or simply not interesting for upstream.

Vincent did a great job in cleaning up the packages, splitting the huge collection in small and manageable pieces (and enabled the awesomeness osc collab offers: upstream version tracking). I took the liberty to work on updating the packages to their latest versions afterward and reworking the main package a bit, especially after having run into issue with xorg being updated, but I forgot the driver packs… boring details, nothing to worry about.

So, you want to test it?
That’s a bit trickier.. most of this work already went back to obs://X11:XOrg (the package cleanup and split) but the updates are so far only available in my bracnh (obs://home:dimstar:branches:X11:XOrg). Not all driver packs were updated (namely: nouveau is still missing), as I focused on my virtual machine.

Yet, after having completed these steps, I’m sure to get the needed boost in motivation again to finish it and to move those packages forward to Factory. Only that we reach Milestone 4 already; wish this would have happened earlier.

So long! Happy testing and machine breaking!