X Server in New Version 1.7.0

Oct 05, 2009

The X.org team has made its X Server 1.7.0 available for download. X.org 7.5 will soon follow, according to a new, ordered release strategy.

The new X Server, by Peter Hutterer's account, will for the first time support multiple simultaneous cursors, which should theoretically allow more than one user's access to the same PC, including for games that use this feature. Also for the first time X Server 1.7.0 will rely on XQuartz to provide a stable server for Mac OS X based on original X Server source code.

The server is compatible with the X.org 7.4 framework so that testers don't need to wait for 7.5 to try the new features. However, the code for X.org 7.5 has already been available since end of August in a freeze state, so that a release is likely to appear in the next weeks.

With the current release, developers decided to issue a new X Server version every six months, which will hopefully eliminate the schedule shifts evident in previous releases. X Server 1.8 should thus appear sometime in April 2010.

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