JhBuildInstructions

Building modular X.org with ''jhbuild''

Introduction

This page provides brief instructions on using jhbuild, a Python-based build tool, to build modular X.Org. jhbuild was written to build GNOME from source, but has been adapted to many other projects.

Prerequisites

Building jhbuild

git clone git://git.gnome.org/jhbuild
cd jhbuild
./autogen.sh
make
make install
cp sample.jhbuildrc ~/.jhbuildrc

(On FreeBSD, do gmake && gmake install .)

Module Set and jhbuild Config File

The moduleset for jhbuilding xorg and an example jhbuildrc are stored in git in the xorg/util/modular repository.

Building the Server, and Everything It Depends On

To build everything, you can do:

mkdir -p $HOME/xorg/util
git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/xorg/util/modular/ $HOME/xorg/util/modular
jhbuild -f $HOME/xorg/util/modular/jhbuildrc

But often you would just want to build the X server and key drivers to enable support of your latest shiny hardware, without replacing all of your X libraries and utilities. In this case, you can build specific targets rather than everything.

You will need a minimal number of drivers as well as the server; rather than executing separate jhbuild commands, you can issue a single one listing all the targets you want to build. The input drivers for PS/2 keyboards and mice are: _xf86-input-keyboard and xf86-input-mouse_.

To build the server and dependencies, along with these drivers, you would type:

jhbuild -f $HOME/xorg/util/modular/jhbuildrc build xserver xf86-video-intel xf86-input-keyboard xf86-input-mouse

Other interesting targets include xorg-drivers which builds all maintained X.org drivers.

Note: rather than building the target xorg-fonts, which will build you an entire additional set of fonts, you may want to make a link in your $prefix area to link to your existing fonts. Unless you have built your X server with --enable-builtin-fontsit will need to access some fonts to start, even though few applications need legacy bitmap fonts anymore.

cd $prefix/lib/X11; ln -s /usr/share/fonts/X11 fonts

Other drivers you may need include the synaptics driver and/or wacom drivers, currently maintained elsewhere (fixme...).

DRM and Kernel Modules

The X server is finally using a device driver on many systems (e.g. Linux, BSD); this is called DRM. It consists of two parts, the generic DRM module and a driver specific to your hardware. Currently, the kernel modules are not built automatically by jhbuild; you can find them in drm/linux-core or drm/bsd-core. To build the drm driver,

make -C linux-core

You may want to install these where you will be able to use them from your /etc/modules file.

Building Other Modules

Other buildable modules include the applications (e.g. xbiff) and the libraries (e.g. libXfixes), plus there a couple of meta modules; xorg-libs will build all libs and xorg-apps will build all apps.

Running The Results

Now that your development environment is set up, you can try running it (as root).

rmmod i915 # assuming you're using Intel
rmmod drm
insmod <path_to_drm_tree_above>/linux-core/drm.ko
insmod <path_to_drm_tree_above>/linux-core/i915.ko
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$prefix/lib
startx -- $prefix/bin/Xorg -verbose # make sure you have a ~/.xinitrc with what you want to run

And there you have it, a fresh stack ready for tracking & doing upstream development. Enjoy!

This page and the modules file for the build were originally written by Kristian Høgsberg, and modified by EricAnholt. Wikified by JimGettys.

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