On Fri, 25 Jun 2004, SATISH RAMANATHAN wrote: >I have a quick, may be silly, question. >My Linux (that runs on RHEL, RH8) application requires Xvfb be installed and >running on the user machine. And we are coming across cases where not all >the user machines have Xvfb installed by default. I believe Xvfb is not >part of the standard package,though it comes with the CD. I would like to >know if it is okay to package and ship the xvfb binary along with my >application. Are there any issues(technical, legal,...) that I need to >consider before doing this? Xvfb is a standard part of the XFree86 source code, and is always built and included with all Red Hat OSs. If you use Red Hat Kickstart to perform installations, you can have Kickstart ensure that Xvfb is always installed. You could also include Xvfb with your application, as it is open source software, however I'd recommend against that for various reasons: - Using the Red Hat supplied Xvfb, when you apply security updates, if there are any updates which affect Xvfb, you'll automatically get them. Otherwise you'd have to monitor X security and update it manually in your application bundle. - Red Hat supports the Red Hat supplied Xvfb, provided the Red Hat supplied rpm packages have been installed. You may need to use mailing lists for Xvfb support issues if you supply it yourself. - By using Red Hat packages, you ensure you don't have files being installed on the filesystem that conflict with potentially rpm managed files. This can cause problems during upgrades, unless of course the file paths are unique. The XFree86 sources included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Red Hat Linux 8.0 are under the various licenses included in the XFree86 documentation. You'd have to check the Xvfb license for the specifics, but I believe it is MIT/X11 like most of the rest of the source tree. DISCLAIMER: This is just friendly information, not legal advice. Please consult the license files or an attourney for legally binding licencing information. ;o) _______________________________________________ xfree86-list mailing list xfree86-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/xfree86-list IRC: #xfree86 on irc.redhat.com
