As part of my ongoing project to get XFree86 working on a NetBSD/alpha system with a commodity PCI video card, I need to do a native build of XFree86. PR 29882 explains why the XFree86 X server is not included by default in the NetBSD release engineering releases, hence the need for my native build.

One slight potential fly in the ointment is that all my NetBSD source trees are stored on my source server and mounted read-only via NFS on the systems that need it. To build XFree86 with a read-only source tree requires a little trickery, but the procedure is nicely explained in the Building XFree86 from a Source Distribution guide (see page 3 onwards). The idea is to create a shadow tree containing symlinks to all the files in the original tree and using that to build instead of the original tree. It’s quick to set up and works very well.

Now to get a decent PCI video card…

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