While development efforts within the X.Org community are now ramping up for the release of X Server 1.9 that should arrive in August, there is an ongoing discussion concerning a planned long-term change for the X Server: pulling the drivers back in.

Keith Packard has just made available the first release candidate of X Server 1.8 and confirms that its release schedule is still on track. Snapshots and the Git code for X Server 1.8 go back to last year, but with a planned release by the end of March, Keith has now started working on release candidates.

While Plymouth already does a great job at mode-setting to the display's native resolution and then showing the selected Plymouth plug-in and then to switch over to GNOME's GDM quite smoothly as the X.Org Server starts up, this process is getting even smoother now.

While the X.Org developers are responsible for a lot of critical code and much of it is quite old and massive. Concerns about the degrading quality of releases have been voiced for years. Fortunately, this situation may finally turn around.

Although some X.org drivers have been updated for X server 1.7, development work is running behind schedule. New drivers from AMD, Intel and Nvidia and new Linux versions mean a number of corrections and enhancements in the graphics system. 3D support for newer Radeon GPUs is now adequate for Compiz. DRBD should make it into the main Linux kernel development tree in 2.6.32.

Adam Jackson has just announced the release of the much anticipated X Server 1.5.0. This is the key component that will make up X.Org 7.4, which we expect to see released (hopefully) this week during the X Developer Summit. The X Server 1.5.0 release announcement can be read on the mailing list, while we'll have a full run-down on X.Org 7.4 as soon as it's released.