After someone on IRC told me, that gnome-terminal appeared to be a lot faster with X.org, I decided to try it out.

As a Debian user, probably the easiest way to get X.org currently is to get the packages from Ubuntu Hoary. When you pin hoary to be below unstable, packages won’t be automatically upgraded to hoary. Then you can search in aptitude for the Xfree packages (serch string: ~V6.8.1-ubuntu or so) and upgrade only these. Dependency tracking will do its share.

After upgrading to X.org, my gdm did not work any more. Upgrading to gdm from ubuntu and in turn pulling in gnome-panel from ubuntu, helped.

So I was able to log in to my new X.org based Desktop. Gnome-Terminal was a lot faster - apparently there has been much improvements with Xft. Other apps fealt faster too.

Then I tired to run glxgears, and my new X.org was dead.

Apparently there is a problem with OpenGL on Hoarys X.org. I don’t know if this is upstream or Hoary only. Even without DRI, glxgears locks up my machine; pure Ubuntu hoary users experice the same with ATI, while nVidia users have glxgears segfault. Interestingly, other OpenGL apps worked - for example the skyrockets screensaver, or scorched3d (apart from the water still totally hosing up display on ATI).

Well, since screensavers sometimes locked up my system, I decided to downgrade to good old reliable XFree again. And to gdm from unstable, too, getting rid of all Ubuntu packages on my system. That came to be more difficult than I had expected… First, gdm would start a xserver, then complain that there is already a xserver running. Seems like it didn’t find the xserver it just started… (the same problem why I upgraded to Ubuntus gdm in first place) the second problem is Xkb, which didn’t work properly any more, causing segfaults in gnome-settings-daemon (Gnome developers might want to investigate this).

After rebooting, gdm worked again (this reminds me of windows times… running the xfree-common init script hadn’t helped, btw.) and after manually removing some xkb files gnome became usable again…