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Xenocara

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Xenocara provides a framework to host OpenBSD modifications and to automate the build of the modular X.Org components, including 3rd party packages and some software maintained by OpenBSD developers.

It includes a customised X.Org X server that utilises a dedicated _x11 user by default to drop privileges and perform privilege separation in accordance to OpenBSD's least privilege policy. Furthermore, Xenocara includes several other projects, such as cwm, a stacking window manager for the X Window System.

The perform privilege separation feature was disabled in Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre because it requires OpenBSD-specific system calls such as pledge and unveil, however it will be implemented for HyperbolaBSD, an operating system which is being developed by Hyperbola Project.

Installation

Xenocara can be installed with the xenocara-server package.

Additionally, some packages from the xenocara-apps group are necessary for certain configuration tasks, they are pointed out in the relevant sections.

Finally, an xenocara group is also available, which includes Xenocara server packages, packages from the xenocara-apps group and fonts.

You will typically seek to install a window manager or a desktop environment to supplement Xenocara.

Driver installation

The Linux-libre kernel includes free video drivers and support for hardware accelerated framebuffers. However, userland support is required for OpenGL and 2D acceleration in X11.

First, identify your card:

$ lspci | grep -e VGA -e 3D

Then install an appropriate driver. You can search the package database for a complete list of free video drivers:

$ pacman -Ss xenocara-video && pacman -Ss xorg-video

Xenocara searches for installed drivers automatically:

  • If it cannot find the specific driver installed for the hardware (listed below), it first searches for fbdev (xorg-video-fbdev).
  • If that is not found, it searches for vesa (xenocara-video-vesa), the generic driver, which handles a large number of chipsets but does not include any 2D or 3D acceleration.
  • If vesa is not found, Xenocara will fall back to kernel mode setting, which includes GLAMOR acceleration (see modesetting(4)).

In order for video acceleration to work, and often to expose all the modes that the GPU can set, a proper video driver is required:

Brand Driver OpenGL OpenGL (multilib)
AMD/ATI
xorg-video-amdgpu mesa lib32-mesa
xenocara-video-ati
Intel xorg-video-intel
NVIDIA xorg-video-nouveau

Fourth generation Intel GPUs users (GMA 3000 from 2006 and newer) may want to use the default Xenocara driver, rather than installing xorg-video-intel driver package. For more information, see modesetting(4).
For NVIDIA GPUs users, may find their respective card's code name (a more detailed list is available on Wikipedia), and compare it with the feature matrix for supported features.
AMD GPUs users (GCN third generation from 2014 and newer) must to use the xorg-video-amdgpu driver package, rather than installing xenocara-video-ati driver package that is dedicated for old AMD and ATI GPUs.

Other video drivers can be found in the xenocara-drivers group.

Xenocara should run smoothly with fully free software drivers. The exceptions to this rule are recent GPUs (especially NVIDIA GPUs), that are not supported. If it is the case, use the default Xenocara driver which includes GLAMOR acceleration (see modesetting(4)).

Acknowledgement

This wiki article is based on ArchWiki. We may have removed non-FSDG bits from it.