Notes on Rebuilding X11R7.5/OS2 from Scratch

Table of Contents
Preface
Tools required
Compiling and Installing

Preface

X11 was initially developed on Unix-based systems. Usually Unix systems provide a rich number of tools and utilities to get certain things done. Under OS/2, these tools are not installed, but ports are available which are sometimes functionally equivalent to Unix utilities with the same name, but also differ sometimes in a subtle way. This guide will give you hints if you intend to rebuild the system from scratch under OS/2.

Please also read README.OS2 for end-user information, and set at least the environment variables described there.

At the current time, the most recent version available is X11R7.5 This is a full and unrestricted version which comes with complete source code. 4.0 is a highly experimental release, so many features that might have worked in earlier versions, may now no longer work, or work differently. Be aware that for OS/2, X11R7.5 is considered to be alpha software.

Tools required

I have tried to reduce the number of external tools, but when looking back it seems I were not very successful. At least I managed to get everything working with the native CMD.EXE shell only. However, there is still plenty of software required. Most of this software is available from hobbes.nmsu.edu or ftp.leo.org via anonymous FTP. The following shopping list shows what you will need:

If there is no version number given, any new version will do. Particularly critical is only EMX/gcc and GNU make. Note that the second GCC implementation which might still be available from some archives is NOT compatible.

Furthermore, you need the X11R7.5 sources. These are available from the common X.Org repositories. Look into a directory which is often named /pub/R7.1.

Compiling and Installing

You need about 300MB of free HPFS space for the whole system. This does not include space for the postscript and troff documentation files. I have never installed them. Nor did I install the test subtree.

  1. Install all the above utilities. Refer to the corresponding documentation. Verify that everything works well, particularly EMX.

  2. It is a good idea to use the same or a similar structure I have. I have made a directory \x11 on the partition for compiling and have put everything below this tree. I found that a clean tree occupies less than the half space of the disk, this gives me the opportunity to rename this tree to \x11old and copy a new version to the same disk to produce diffs. Last time the complete tree was arranged under the root directory xc, this would become \x11\xc then.

  3. To unpack the files you would usually execute the command 

    gzip -dc file.tar.gz | tar xvf -
    in the \x11 directory. At the end you will usually see the irritating, but non-fatal message "gzip: stdout Broken pipe". Ignore it.

  4. After that, is is likely necessary to apply some patches, either from the X.Org Foundation. Before you do this, enter 

          chmod -R a+rw \x11\xc
    to make certain files in the tree writable.

  5. There should be a file added-XXX accompanying the patch file which lists the files that are newly created. The patch program has a problem with creating new directories, so we need to create them on advance. For each added-XXX file you find, execute from \x11 

    xc\config\util\added added-XXX
    If there is no added-XXX file available, you can make one with the following instructions: 
          grep "\*\*\* xc/" patchfile >added-file
    Edit added-file with a text editor and remove the *** at the beginning and the time stamp at the end (search for a TAB and erase to the end of the line). You get a list of file paths, one in a line, which is the input to the added utility.

  6. After that you can apply the patches in the right order. Usually this is done by a command 

          patch -p -E <patchfile 2>&1 | tee patchlog
    from the \x11 directory. Be aware to use the right patch - OS/2 has a utility with the same name and different functionality. Don't use the recommended -s option, this makes patch quiet, and you won't see problems in the patchlog file. Use 
          find \x11 -name *.rej -print
      find \x11 -name *# -print
    to find any rejects and unapplied patches (attention: yet another OS/2 program with wrong functionality). Normally there shouldn't be any problems of this kind, else you have made a mistake. Finally remove the original files with 
          find \x11 -name *.orig -print -exec rm {} ;

  7. Go to the xc/config/cf directory and edit the xorgsite.def file to match your requirements (you probably don't want to compile all X servers). Certain changes must be set to the following values:

    • Disable if not already done any PC98 server; PC98 (Japanese X11R7.5) does not work yet. Porters from Japan are welcome!

    • #define WacomSupport NO #define ElographicsSupport NO Both options are not yet supported.

    • Tcl* and Tk* don't need to be set explicitly. Reasonable defaults are in the other config files, provided you have a complete X11R7.5/OS2 binary tree with the tcl/tk runtime support installed.

    • #define BuildDynamicLoading NO This does not work.

  8. Go to the directory xc\util\compress and make compress.exe there. Install the program produced there in your path. I stumbled more than once on half-ported compress programs on OS/2 ftp servers that are defective w.r.t. reading and writing stdin/stdout. In some stage (font compression) otherwise you will get a core dump of mkfontdir, because all compressed fonts are corrupt.

  9. Set the environment variable X11ROOT to something different than it is; otherwise the installation process will overwrite your original X11R7.5/OS2 installation. If you have not set this variable, go back to the prefix section of this document: you have forgotten something.

  10. Copy the file xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/etc/bindist/OS2/host.def.os2 to the location xc/config/cf/host.def. Use this file to do any specific modifications to imake variables, rather than editing the file xorg.cf, imake.tmpl, or os2.cf directly.

  11. Copy the file xc/config/util/buildos2.cmd into the xc directory. If this is a second or later attempt, you might need to copy the saved toplevel Makefile.os2 back to Makefile.

  12. Execute this buildos2.cmd command in the xc directory; it will produce a logfile buildxc.log in this directory.

  13. Go have a bucket of coffee, or better, buy new coffee - in Colombia! The compile will need between 2 and 20 hours, depending on your selections, and the horse power of your hardware.

  14. When finished, view the logfile for errors, and fix the problems if there are some. I have managed to compile the whole system flawlessly, so there is at least one configuration that works.

  15. Finally, from the xc dir, execute 

          xmake install
      xmake install.man

  16. There are a few minor glitches in the installation:

    1. The xdm and linkkit directories will fail in compile and installation. This is no problem and has no effect on the rest of the system.

    2. The imake.exe which is installed in \X11R7.5\bin is usually defective. The one which was built initially and installed in the root directory of the drive where you have the source tree is okay. So simply copy this \imake.exe to the \X11R7.5\bin directory manually. Some day this might be fixed.

Well, you see, this was quite easy :-)