His most visible contribution is his long-time maintenance of the X Window System packages, which he took over from Mark W. Eichin by uploading the 3.3.2 release of the XFree86 packages on 1998-03-25.
David Dawes (born 3 December 1964), is one of the founders of the XFree86 project.
GNU Unifont is a bitmap-based font created by Roman Czyborra that is present in most free operating systems and windowing systems such as Linux, XFree86 or the X.Org Server.
The modern X.Org Foundation came into being when the body that oversaw X standards and published the official reference implementation joined forces with former XFree86 developers.
XFree86 |
While Dawes explained this as an attempt to make sure the XFree86 developers get their due credit (apparently in response to the Xouvert fork), the decision was contested in the XFree86 community, notably by Jim Gettys and Keith Packard, and the dissenters subsequently forked the project into the X.Org Server.
ISC also expanded their operational activities to include Internet hosting facilities for other open source projects such as NetBSD, XFree86, kernel.org, secondary name service (SNS) for more than 50 top-level domains, and a DNS OARC (Operations, Analysis and Research Center) for monitoring and reporting of the Internet's DNS.
In recent XFree86 and X.Org incarnations of the X Window System, it can be accessed as a compose sequence of two straight question marks, i.e. pressing
After the keyboard setup XFree86 locates the path to the RGB database, to the modules and to where the fonts are.
After many years as part of the X reference implementation, around 1996 the main line of development then shifted to XFree86 (which itself forked from X11R6.3), and it is presently actively maintained by Thomas Dickey.