This morning, hardworking Debian developers pushed the remaining pieces of the brand new X.Org 7.3 to Debian sid (unstable) distribution. And it must be said, a well done job!

ii  x11-apps            7.3+1      X applications
ii  x11-common          1:7.3+2    X Window System (X.Org)
ii  x11-session-utils   7.3+1      X session utilities
ii  x11-utils           7.3+1      X11 utilities
ii  x11-xfs-utils       7.3+1      X font server utilities
ii  x11-xkb-utils       7.3+1      X11 XKB utilities
ii  x11-xserver-utils   7.3+1      X server utilities
ii  xbase-clients       1:7.3+2    miscellaneous X clients - metapackage
ii  xorg                1:7.3+2    X.Org X Window System
ii  xorg-dev            1:7.3+2    the X.Org X Window System development
ii  xserver-xorg        1:7.3+2    the X.Org X server
ii  xutils              1:7.3+2    X Window System utility programs


Sunnyvale, Calif - September 7, 2007 - AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced a major strategic initiative to support the Open Source development community for ATI Radeon™ graphics processors. The week of September 10th, AMD plans to provide an open source information and development package supporting the ATI Radeon™ HD 2000 series as well as ATI Radeon™ X1000 series of graphics processing units (GPU) on Linux desktops. To accelerate this initiative, AMD partnered with Novell's SuSE Linux engineering team.

Features

• Xorg server 1.4 - see Server14Branch for more details. Highlights:
  • RandR 1.2: RandR 1.2 offers output hotplug, as well as on-the-fly output reconfiguration and mode switching.
  • Input hotplug: Input hotplug allows hotplugging of input devices, and also adds enhanced support for touchscreens and tablets, through either HAL or D-Bus.
  • KDrive: Numerous enhancements have been made to the KDrive codebase, including better support for multiple input devices.
  • DTrace: When running on OpenSolaris, DTrace support is available in the X server, allowing detailed accounting of operations inside the server.
  • EXA: A great deal of work has been done on the EXA framework to make it more usable.
• New applications: xbacklight
• New drivers: xf86-video-glide, xf86-video-vermilion
• New man pages for API's: libXinerama, libXcomposite, XKB functions in libX11, Xtest functions in libXtst
• Support for font catalogue directories in font path
• xdm: Xft support added

This one has bothered me for a long time. The solution is, of course, simple. But, I still don't understand why was it necessary to force users to search so hard for this piece of information, where all the older X server releases worked OK out of the box?

If you find that after upgrading to X.Org 7.3 your display becomes very slow, and you own ATI Radeon, all you need to do is to put this line in the Device section of your xorg.conf:

Jerome Glisse announced today that a small team of X.Org developers has managed to provide the initial support for ATI R500-based cards (ATI Radeon X1300 up to X1600 at the time) by reverse engineering. The released code is definitely not yet ready for the normal users, but it's the big step ahead nevertheless. Especially having in mind how ATI (now owned by AMD) has not provided specifications of their hardware to the open source community. Jerome writes:

Five months after release of X11R7.0, the modularized and autotooled release of the MIT ("X") Licensed X Window System source code, the X.Org Foundation has issued its first modular roll-up release.