NOTE: This worked on the Sid (unstable branch) of Debian. I am not sure if it will work on woody or sarge. Credit goes to whiprush and evane on arstechnica who spent the time to help me get through this. Thanks guys. Also, if you use Nvidia drivers, make sure you have a copy of them in your home directory, since you will have to reinstall them after the upgrade.

Your reasons for upgrading to XFree86-4.3.0 may vary, so I am not going to go into that. I upgraded because I just wanted to. So here are the steps:

1) Edit apt sources.list

# vi /etc/apt/sources.list

and add the following to it:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian ../project/experimental main contrib non-free

Save sources.list.

2) Update apt:

# apt-get update

3) Make a text file and add the following info to it. Call the text file whatever you want:
lbxproxy
libdps1
libxaw7
proxymngr
twm
x-window-system
x-window-system-core
xbase-clients
xdm
xfonts-100dpi
xfonts-75dpi
xfonts-base
xfonts-scalable
xfree86-common
xfs
xlibmesa-dri
xlibmesa-gl
xlibmesa-gl-dev
xlibmesa-glu
xlibmesa-glu-dev
xlibs
xlibs-data
xlibs-dev
xlibs-pic
xlibs-static-pic
xnest
xprt
xserver-common
xserver-xfree86
xspecs
xterm
xutils
xvfb

3) Make apt install the packages for you:

apt-get install -t experimental `cat /path/to/the/above/textfile`

note: ` = the tilde key, usually under the esc key on keyboards.


That is pretty much it for the install/upgrade. Other things you might want to do afterwards:

Reboot and go into single user mode (if using lilo, go to the boot prompt and type: Linux single) , login as root. There you might want to make a new XFree86-4 file. Just look at the instructions at the top of /etc/X11/XFree86-4, it tells you exactly what to do. I will put them here anyways:

#If you have edited this file but would like it to be automatically updated
# again, run the following commands as root:
#
# cp /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 /etc/X11/XF86Config-4.custom
# md5sum /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 > /var/lib/xfree86/XF86Config-4.md5sum
# dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86

If you use Nvidia drivers, you are going to have to reinstall them since the upgrade to XFree86-4.3.0 overwrites them. I think you all know how to do that.

And that is all. Good Luck!!