2. How to get the XFree86 4.0 binary distributions

We, The XFree86 Project, provide XFree86 4.0 binaries for a range of operating systems at our ftp site. Our ftp site is also mirrored by many sites around the world. There is a sub-directory for each OS/platform that we have binaries for. The first thing you need to do is to decide which of these suits you. In most cases, the choice is straightforward. In some cases (e.g., Linux) there may be a number of choices depending on what architecture or libc version you are using. We recommend that you first download the Xinstall.sh script, and run it as follows to find out which binary distribution you should download.

sh Xinstall.sh -check

This should tell you which binary distribution is the correct one for your system. Getting this right may save from wasting time downloading the wrong distribution.

The next step is to download the necessary files. The mandatory files for all installations are listed below. All of them must be downloaded to do the installation. The installer script will complain if they are not all present.

Xinstall.sh      The installer script
extract          The utility for extracting tarballs
Xbin.tgz         X clients/utilities and run-time libraries
Xlib.tgz         Some data files required at run-time
Xman.tgz         Manual pages
Xdoc.tgz         XFree86 documentation
Xfnts.tgz        Base set of fonts
Xfenc.tgz        Base set of font encoding data
Xetc.tgz         Run-time configuration files
Xvar.tgz         Run-time data
Xxserv.tgz       XFree86 X server
Xmod.tgz         XFree86 X server modules

NOTES:

• Some web browsers have a problem downloading the extract utility correctly. If you encounter this problem, download the version called extract.exe instead. The ".exe" suffix is only there to make the troublesome web browsers do the right thing. It is not a DOS/Windows executable.
• A few distributions don't have or require the Xvar.tgz tarball. If it is present in the binaries sub-directory for your platform, then it is required.
• Some distributions may have additional mandatory tarballs. This is rare. In these cases, the installer script will tell you if any are missing.

The following tarballs are optional. You should download the ones you want to install.

Xfsrv.tgz        Font server
Xnest.tgz        Nested X server
Xprog.tgz        X header files, config files and compile-time libs
Xprt.tgz         X Print server
Xvfb.tgz         Virtual framebuffer X server
Xf100.tgz        100dpi fonts
Xfcyr.tgz        Cyrillic fonts
Xflat2.tgz       Latin-2 fonts
Xfnon.tgz        Some large bitmap fonts
Xfscl.tgz        Scalable fonts (Speedo and Type1)
Xhtml.tgz        HTML version of the documentation
Xps.tgz          PostScript version of the documentation
Xjdoc.tgz        Documentation in Japanese

NOTES:

• Some distributions may have some additional optional tarballs.

If you miss some and want to install them later, you can do so by following the appropriate part of the section that describes manual installation.