X Window System on Solaris™

David Holland

XFree86 Project

Marc Aurele La France

XFree86 Project

Alan Coopersmith

Oracle Corp.

X Version 11, Release 7.7

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Table of Contents

The VT-switching sub-system in Solaris
Notes for building X11R7.7 on Solaris
Notes for running Xorg on Solaris
Bug Notification

The VT-switching sub-system in Solaris

The original virtual terminal sub-system is a undocumented, and unsupported
feature of Solaris x86 releases 2.1 through 7. It was removed in Solaris 8 and
later releases, and was never present on Solaris SPARC. Support for this
version of virtual terminals is only present in Xorg 1.6.x and earlier releases
of Xorg, and has been removed in Xorg 1.7 and later. If you use this form of
virtual terminals, you do so at YOUR OWN RISK.

A new virtual terminal sub-system has been introduced in Solaris 11, and is
also available in systems based on the OpenSolaris or illumos sources. This
version is supported on both SPARC and x86 platforms, though SPARC support is
limited to devices with "Coherent Console" support in the kernel frame buffer
driver. Support for it is found only in Xorg 1.7 and later server releases.

When available, the virtual terminals of Solaris work basically the same way as
most other VT sub-systems.

Notes for building X11R7.7 on Solaris

 1. Both GCC, and the Sun Studio compilers are supported by X11R7.7. The
    minimum recommended GCC release is 3.4. Some earlier GCC's are known to not
    work and should be avoided.

    You should also make certain your version of GCC predefines `sun'. If
    needed edit /usr/local/lib/gcc-lib/*/*/specs, and modify the *predefines:
    line.

 2. To build X11R7.7 with GCC you need gcc and (optionally) c++filt from GNU
    binutils. Don't install gas or ld from GNU binutils, use the one provided
    by Sun.

 3. If you are using Sun compilers to compile the X11R7.7 distribution, you
    need to modify your PATH appropriately so the Sun compiler tools are
    available. Normally, they should be in /opt/SUNWspro/bin

 4. You MUST put /usr/ccs/bin at the front of your PATH. There are known
    problems with some GNU replacements for the utilities found there, so the /
    usr/ccs/bin versions of these programs must be found before any possible
    GNU versions. (Most notably GNU 'ar' does not work during the build).

Notes for running Xorg on Solaris

 1. Depending on the release or architecture of Solaris you are running, you
    might need to install an OS driver for an aperture device.

    Under Solaris x86 2.5 and later, there's a system driver (/dev/xsvc) that
    provides this functionality. It will be detected automatically by the
    server, so you don't need to install the aperture driver.

    For older Solaris x86 and for Solaris SPARC releases, the source for this
    driver is included in hw/xfree86/os-support/solaris/apSolaris.shar in the
    xserver source distribution. Building, and installing the driver is
    relatively straight forward. Please read its accompanying README file.

 2. Xqueue is NOT supported under Solaris.

Bug Notification

Bug reports should be reported at http://bugs.freedesktop.org/ using the xorg
product or sent to .