Are you using the gtk2 packages from testing? Those seem to be built against the libXfixes library, which is part of the new DAMAGE extention introduced in xorg 6.8.0.

Apeiro: maybe it is possible to make a backwards compatibility package or something, my debian friend which is forced to use Xfree86 4.3.0 just compiled Xorg from source, installed it to another prefix and runs Xorg to get dual display, but uses the normal XFree86 4.3 libs to link his programs to. I think it is possible the other way. This would require a splitup of x-server and xlibs or something like that (only the outdated libs are a problem, the server doesn't matter at all)

Yes I am.

Currently I am building a compatibility package to bridge XFree86 4.4 to support the same libraries as Xorg 6.8.1. I'm writing this with a running gnome 2.9.2 desktop that was compiled against xorg with the missing xfixes.so files. Currently I have XFree86 4.4 running on this system with simply some libraries copied from the xorg package in an additional directory, which I added to /etc/ld.so.conf
With the new package, you can simply install that package to extend your old XFree86 4.4 or Xorg 6.7 with the new libraries. The apps that use those libraries check if the X server supports those extentions anyways, so you won't have problems with it.

I provided a sample PKGBUILD to add compatibility libs, we have two options:

- wreck x-server provides out of xfree86 and place it in this package
- include the build instructions of this PKGBUILD to the xfree86 package

Both require a rebuild, and tough the 2nd option is the cleanest, I prefer the 1st option, so people using older versions of packages are still able to use it.

I patched up xfree86 to include the new libs, but XFree86 doesn't build at this moment with the current glibc and gcc it seems. I'm working on it, expect a "compatible" XFree86 release next week or something.