On Friday 15 January 2010 20:43:32 Harry Putnam wrote: > [Please excuse if this is a double whammy... it appears not to have > made it to the mail/news server] > > Sorry for the awkwardly phrased subject... but couldn't think of > anything better. > > I'm rebuilding my home desktop with a full reinstall > > So far haven't gotten to getting X working... but did notice that when > I test what all gets installed with: > > emerge -vp xfce4-meta > > I notice that xorg-x11 is not amongst the... dependencies. > > xorg-server is absent as well, but I seem to recall a more basic xorg > pkgs being involved. Maybe something like xorg-base... or whatever. > > Apparently something has happened with naming of pkgs or something, > that I haven't kept up with. > > But can a user really get use out of xfce4-meta with no xorg-server?
Yes. This is how X11 works. xfce does not need a full blown xserver on the *local* machine, it simply needs X libs to function. The X libs in turn will talk to the xserver, which does not have to be on the local machine. Parallel situation: You do not need X and a browser on a machine running a web server, as the pages served are not necessarily viewed on the machine hosting apache. To get X you can either; merge xorg-x11 (this is the "meta" package you didn't know the name of) or put "X" in USE Note carefully that this is not a silly situation, it works this way by design. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
