This is no longer the current release. For information about the current release, please see Releases/latest.
In response to demand of users and application developers, X.Org's X11R6.8 brings forward widely anticipated fundamental facilities through this release. They include the first X Window System support for:
These new facilities, some of which are still considered experimental and so not enabled by default, have been under development for several years. Once completed and deployed, they will enable X Window System desktop projects, such as Gnome and KDE, to greatly extend their visual user interface vocabulary while still ensuring uncompromised support for existing applications, even surpassing current state of the art in competing window systems.
These facilities will enable easy implementation of thumbnailing, screen magnifiers for accessibility, translucent windows, menus, drop shadows, and even integration of conventional applications into 3D immersive environments. They are the result of open collaboration within the freedesktop.org community, desktop projects, and the X Window System user and developer community. For some illustrations visit our screen shots page.
Features also included in this release are updates and fixes to: FreeType2, !Xprint, XawPrintShell, Mesa, DRI, driver rotation support, Render, and many driver updates. See xc/ChangeLog for list of fixes and enhancements.
The X.Org code base was derived from XFree86 4.4 RC2. Just before its 4.4 release, XFree86 adopted a new license possibly incompatible with the GPL. For this reason, we have recreated its tree as closely as possible without importing files affected by the new license. The monolithic tree is being referred to as simply "XOrg".
We expect that this will be one of the last major "monolithic" releases of the X Window System. There will be coordinated releases of everything currently in the traditional tree, but they will no longer be contained in a single giant tarball.