Five Updates For Vintage X.Org Drivers

For any unfortunate souls still stuck to crippled graphics hardware, there's five X.Org drivers that have been updated this weekend.

The new xf86-video driver releases this weekend are for APM, i740, Newport, S3, and S3Virge. These are DDX drivers for old and rather obscure graphics processors. The driver updates themselves also aren't really exciting: most of them were just made to support the latest X.Org Server interfaces so they can run with X.Org Server 1.12.x. X.Org Server 1.12 was released in early March. The driver updates were made by Julien Cristau out of the Debian camp.

The xf86-video-apm driver is the X.Org driver for Alliance ProMotion video hardware. Besides xorg-server 1.12 support, this xf86-video-apm 1.2.4 update just has various minor fixes. Its new announcement is here.

The xf86-video-i740 1.3.3 update for the old Intel i740 is also in the same boat with X.Org 1.12 support and various small changes.

Onto xf86-video-newport, this driver was in even worse shape. Showing how this driver is rarely used (at all?) or even built, this release is the first to support versions of the X.Org Server newer than 1.7. X Server 1.7 was released in October of 2009, so it's taken the better part of three years for someone to actually care about this driver enough for modern X.Org to see it updated, and Julien is just doing these updates for Debian packaging reasons. The xf86-video-newport driver is for SGI Indy and Indigo 2 "Newport" graphics -- hardware from the early to mid 90's. The xf86-video-newport 0.2.5 announcement is here.

The next update by Cristau was for xf86-video-s3 0.6.4. The S3 X.Org driver now works on X.Org Server 1.12 along with various other fixes -- like the other drivers, most of the "fixes" are configure script updates.

Lastly, there is xf86-video-s3virge with a similar set of changes.