About.com: Upgrade to XFree86 4

“It’s one of those odd times in the Linux world again. The world
of XFree86 3 is clearly passe, thanks to its lack of strong 3D
support, but XFree86 4 hasn’t really begun to ship in new
distributions yet. Even more importantly, most users won’t want to
go through the pain of upgrading an entire distribution just to get
the new XFree86, as seductive as the new direct-rendering 3D
features sound.”

“So in this article, let’s step through the process for
upgrading your XFree86 4.0 installation. … If your
distribution maintainer is already packaging 4.0 as a set of
updates, get the new XFree86 that way — it’ll be a lot cleaner.
We’re going to do things the “dirty” way here, mangling your
package database dependencies a little. Generally, what we’re
going to do will work fine, but you shouldn’t attempt the
upgrade this way if you’re a total Linux novice.”

“The first step in the upgrade package is to connect to the
XFree86 FTP site and download all of the XFree86 4 components.
Since there are a number of packages installed, the easiest way to
accomplish this is with an FTP command. I prefer ncftpget, which is
installed by many Linux distributions by default. Be sure to make a
directory to hold the XFree86 files first.”

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