X11Libre-SlackBuild

This repository provides a Slackware X11 build tree modified to build XLibre. The sources were imported from Slackware-current Xorg and the XLibre project on July 1, 2025 and are constantly updated.

Preparing for Install

Before building and installing the packages, it is recommended to set the default runlevel of your system to text mode a.k.a. runlevel 3 instead of graphical mode a.k.a. 4 in the file /etc/inittab:

#id:4:initdefault:
id:3:initdefault:

Doing so will make your system always boot into text mode and gives you a nice safety margin in case the X server fails to start. After system startup and logging in as root user you will be able to manually switch to graphical mode by running telinit 4.

When you see that XLibre works the way you want it, you can switch the default runlevel back to 4 in /etc/inittab. Another possibility to work around problems with X server is to have a SSH server start up on your machine by default and remote controlling it from another computer.

Prebuilt XLibre Packages for Slackware-15.0

Update: This option is temporarily unavailable until some issues with workflows are resolved.

Thanks to rc-05 it turned out that it is perfectly possible to build XLibre on a stable Slackware-15.0. He provided a CI script that rebuilds the packages for 64 bit each time this repository gets updated. Just go to Releases and get XLibre-Slackware-15-x86_64-{release date and time}-{commit sha reference}.tar.gz archive with the latest release, unpack it in some directory, and run

cat blacklist >> /etc/slackpkg/blacklist
upgradepkg --reinstall *.txz

Several Slackware packages need also to be upgraded for XLibre to run properly, all you have to do is:

• to go to slackware-15.0 testing directory, grab libdrm-2.4.125-x86_64-1_slack15.0.txz, libva-2.22.0-x86_64-1_slack15.0.txz, mesa-25.0.7-x86_64-2_slack15.0.txz, and spirv-llvm-translator-20.1.3-x86_64-1_slack15.0.txz, and run

upgradepkg --reinstall libdrm-2.4.125-x86_64-1_slack15.0.txz libva-2.22.0-x86_64-1_slack15.0.txz mesa-25.0.7-x86_64-2_slack15.0.txz spirv-llvm-translator-20.1.3-x86_64-1_slack15.0.txz

to replace libdrm, libva, mesa, and spirv-llvm-translator with newer versions.

• to take llvm-20.1.8-x86_64-1_slack15.0.txz at slackware-15.0 extra directory and upgrade it:

upgradepkg llvm-20.1.8-x86_64-1_slack15.0.txz

for X drivers to build and function correctly.

Older LLVM versions are available as llvm13-compat, llvm17-compat and llvm19-compat. These packages can be installed like this:

slackpkg install llvm13-compat llvm17-compat llvm-19compat

or manually by grabbing them from the slackware-15.0 extra directory and simply running installpkg on each package.

Now you have a working XLibre!

Prerequisites to Build XLibre Yourself

It is assumed that you have installed the entire X packages set. Some things of it will be necessary to build XLibre, another ones will be overwritten or upgraded during XLibre install. This set is not that large, so it's safer to install it completely.

If you have a more or less recent Slackware-current, this is sufficient. For a stable Slackware-15.0 or an older Slackware-current, please upgrade several outdated packages as described above.

Getting the Build Files

There are two ways to obtain the build files: via downloading a ZIP archive or via Git cloning the repository.

Downloading the ZIP Archive

You can download the ZIP archive of this repository and extract it afterwards:

wget -O X11Libre-SlackBuild.zip https://github.com/ONykyf/X11Libre-SlackBuild/archive/refs/heads/main.zip
unzip X11Libre-SlackBuild.zip
mv X11Libre-SlackBuild-main X11Libre-SlackBuild
cd X11Libre-SlackBuild

Please be advised that the initial download of the ZIP archive is about 76 MB.

Cloning the Repository

You can also clone the repository with Git like so:

git clone https://github.com/ONykyf/X11Libre-SlackBuild.git
cd X11Libre-SlackBuild

Using this method gives you the opportunity to later simply update the repository by running git pull. Please be advised that the initial download of the Git repository is about 160 MB.

Running the SlackBuild

After downloading and changing into the main directory, just run the SlackBuild to build all the packages provided by this build tree:

./x11libre.Slackbuild

Grab some coffee and wait. It won't take too long to compile the entire X11 tree with XLibre instead of Xorg. By default the built packages are immediately installed and replace older versions you have on your system. As a bonus, you get the most up-to-date X libraries and applications with all dependencies satisfied.

Building the XLibre Xserver and its Drivers Only

If your system is more or less up-to-date, you can try to recompile the X server and its drivers only:

./x11libre.SlackBuild xlibre-server
./x11libre.SlackBuild xlibre-driver
# second pass due to circular dependencies on libinput
./x11libre.SlackBuild xlibre-server

Building Select Packages Only

To build select packages only you can utilize the structure of the src directory. If you e.g. only want to build the package xkeyboard-config located under src/data you would invoke the build with:

./x11libre.SlackBuild data xkeyboard-config

This applies to all the other directories and files found in src as well.

Controlling the Upgrade Process

You can control how packages are upgraded as they are built via the environment variable UPGRADE_PACKAGES. The default is to always upgrade newly-built packages, effectively setting UPGRADE_PACKAGES=always. To install newly built packages only if a package with the exact name is not already installed, use UPGRADE_PACKAGES=yes. To not upgrade any packages when they are built, pass UPGRADE_PACKAGES=no.

Logging and Debugging the Build

Although in most cases the upgrade works flawlessly, you might want to collect the configure and build logs of all packages for future reference or troubleshooting by invoking the SlackBuild like this:

./x11libre.SlackBuild 2>&1 | tee ~/X-configure-build.log

In the unlikely case some package foo fails to build, a file foo.patch_failed, foo.configure_failed, or foo.make_failed will appear in /tmp/x11-build instead of foo.txz.

Known Pitfalls

If your Slackware is too outdated, you may have to build all packages via x11libre.SlackBuild and it may take two passes to build them. This is very unlikely, but libSM, libXaw, libXaw3d and libXt needed a second pass to build on one of my boxes.

On another rather outdated system xkeyboard-config failed to configure and the log revealed that python3 lacked the module strenum. So I installed the missing module and reran the build:

pip3 install strenum
./x11libre.SlackBuild data xkeyboard-config

Finishing the Build

After the build you will find the built packages in /tmp/x11-build/*.txz. Please keep them in a safe place. You may also use them to install XLibre on another computer. In the x11-build directory there will also be subdirectories containing source code. You may remove them if you are not curious about their contents.

Securing the build if you are using slackpkg

To prevent slackpkg package manager from accidentally downgrading the installed XLibre packages, use the provided generate_slackpkg_blacklist.sh script to generate a blacklist file and add its contents to /etc/slackpkg/blacklist. Add libdrm, libva, and mesa to the last file manually as well, if XLibre is built on a stable Slackware-15.0.

Uninstalling

Don't worry, you can go back to Xorg any time!

Switch your default runlevel to text mode as described above, change to your safe place where you kept the *.txz packages and run removepkg:

cd <safe-place-of-packages>
removepkg *.txz

Then change into the main SlackBuild directory X11Libre-SlackBuild, open the file x11libre.SlackBuild in your text editor of choice and uncomment the line below the line # You can build Xorg as well and comment the third line before it containing xlibre-server like so:

--- x11libre.SlackBuild.orig	2025-12-29 20:56:45.000000000 +0200
+++ x11libre.SlackBuild	2025-12-29 20:56:55.000000000 +0200
@@ -147,10 +147,10 @@
   # EXACTLY ONE OF THE FOLLOWING FIVE "for" LINES MUST BE UNCOMMENTED!
 
   # xlibre-server is built twice due to a circular dependency on input-libinput in xlibre-driver
-  for x_source_dir in proto data util xcb lib app doc xlibre-server xlibre-driver xlibre-server font ; do
+#  for x_source_dir in proto data util xcb lib app doc xlibre-server xlibre-driver xlibre-server font ; do
 
   # You can build Xorg as well
-#  for x_source_dir in proto data util xcb lib app doc xserver driver font ; do
+  for x_source_dir in proto data util xcb lib app doc xserver driver font ; do
 
   # This way you will build the latest verified "bleeding edge" xserver version from master branch
 #  for x_source_dir in proto data util xcb lib app doc xserver-master xlibre-driver xserver-master font ; do

Grab another cup of coffee and run:

./x11libre.SlackBuild

You will get a brand new Xorg... but what for?

Building with xserver from 'master' branch

If you are adventurous and want to try the latest development version of XLibre xserver that I have successfully tried out myself, the tree contains sources for it as well in the src/xserver-master subdirectory. Then the third of the five proposed options must be chosen:

--- x11libre.SlackBuild.orig	2025-12-29 20:56:45.000000000 +0200
+++ x11libre.SlackBuild	2025-12-29 21:05:56.000000000 +0200
@@ -147,13 +147,13 @@
   # EXACTLY ONE OF THE FOLLOWING FIVE "for" LINES MUST BE UNCOMMENTED!
 
   # xlibre-server is built twice due to a circular dependency on input-libinput in xlibre-driver
-  for x_source_dir in proto data util xcb lib app doc xlibre-server xlibre-driver xlibre-server font ; do
+#  for x_source_dir in proto data util xcb lib app doc xlibre-server xlibre-driver xlibre-server font ; do
 
   # You can build Xorg as well
 #  for x_source_dir in proto data util xcb lib app doc xserver driver font ; do
 
   # This way you will build the latest verified "bleeding edge" xserver version from master branch
-#  for x_source_dir in proto data util xcb lib app doc xserver-master xlibre-driver xserver-master font ; do
+  for x_source_dir in proto data util xcb lib app doc xserver-master xlibre-driver xserver-master font ; do
 
   # This line (re)builds xserver and drivers only, if your system is recent enough
 #  for x_source_dir in xlibre-server xlibre-driver xlibre-server ; do

You can even build the actual untested version by going to XLibre xserver repository with a browser and pressing the green Code button and Download ZIP afterwards to get an xserver-master.zip archive. Repack it to *.tar.gz format by

unzip xserver-master.zip
rm xserver-master.zip
tar cvzf xserver-master.tar.gz xserver-master
rm -rf xserver-master

and replace the file src/xserver-master/xserver-master.tar.gz with the obtained one. PLEASE be advised that the patches in patch/xserver-master may then stop working or simply fail to be applied cleanly, e.g., if they have already been merged into master. Now it's your playground and you are free to experiment.

nVidia legacy proprietary drivers

They are not included into this repository, but you can get here slackbuilds with sources for nvidia340, nvidia390, and nvidia470 drivers that work nicely with this XLibre install.

Contact

Please report any issues to Issues · ONykyf/X11Libre-SlackBuild. In case you need help, want to report success or talk about other aspects of the build, just go to Welcome to XLibre on Slackware Linux! · X11Libre · Discussion #217.