X.Org Server 1.19.7 Released With A Fix For The Two Decade Old SiS 6326

While X.Org Server 1.20.4 was just released a few days ago with XWayland improvements and more, for vintage computer enthusiasts there is now the X.Org Server 1.19.7 that was released independently to provide a six for helping out the SiS 6326. Yes, the graphics processor from 1998.

Kevin Brace, the independent X.Org contributor who began contributing to the OpenChrome project and has since expanded to work on other vintage open-source graphics drivers, organized this xorg-server 1.19.7 release. He was motivated to ship a simple fix that allows for 24-bit color mode to work now with the Xfce desktop on the SiS 6326. A simple oversight in the original X.Org Server EXA code was causing issues with 24-bit color support and ultimately leading to a crash for non-32-bit color support.

The xorg-server 1.19.7 release also has queued various other fixes for GLAMOR, RandR, XWayland, and more. In total there are just over two dozen fixes as part of this release. The complete list of changes can be found via this mailing list post.

The usefulness of this new 1.19.x point release though may be short-lived. Given that anyone still using the SiS 6326 graphics is incredibly rare, it's mostly a novelty release. X.Org Server 1.20 has been out for ten months already and for the distributions still on the 1.19 series they are mostly either approaching an unmaintained state or in cases like Ubuntu, they don't tend to update against X.Org point releases anyways as stable release updates. For those with any modern GPUs, xorg-server 1.20 is easily better thanks to the XWayland improvements and many other improvements.

Brace has also suggested doing other older X.Org Server releases to help out those with vintage graphics cards where using the newer X.Org Server is less than ideal.