12.2. Overview

FreeBSD comes with XFree86, a port of X11R6 that supports several versions of Intel-based UNIX. This chapter describes how to set up your XFree86 server. It is based on material supplied with the FreeBSD release, specifically the files README.FreeBSD and README.Config in the directory /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/doc. If you find any discrepancy, the material in those files will be more up-to-date than this description. In addition, the file /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/doc/RELNOTES contains OS-independent information about the current release.

X uses a lot of memory. In order to run X, your system should have an absolute minimum of 8 MB of memory, but performance will be painful with so little memory. A more practical minimum is 16 MB, and you can improve performance by adding more memory. If you use X intensively, you will continue seeing performance improvement by increasing to as much as 128 MB of RAM.

There is lots of useful information in the rest of this chapter, but maybe you are not interested in information right now. You just want to get your X server up and running. However, be warned:

However, if you know you are in spec, and you have a standard Super VGA board and a good multi-frequency monitor, then you can probably get things up and running without reading this chapter.