Followed some advice here, now my freebsd machine locks up right at bootup

[live4themusic]

I have an operating systems class that I was under the impression it would be wise to use FreeBSD for. We had an assignment due last wednesday and I am STILL struggling with getting freebsd to work nicely. The teacher is understanding and has told me he's flexible with when I have this first one completed, but it's getting to be so much of a hassle I'm about to throw my hands up and start trying stuff in Windows

I just bought a 4 GB HD Compaq Ipaq desktop from like 10 years ago so I could just dedicate it to FreeBSD so keep in mind it has that limitation.

Here's the problem:

After finally figuring out how to get xwindows to startup, the mouse and keyboard weren't working in it. I found a thread here that said to make a couple changes in etc/rc.conf (http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=6560)

Made the changes described. When I rebooted, I started getting an error OVER and OVER again "ACD0 FAILURE ...." this error just repeats and repeats endlessly. I CANT DO ANYTHING. I know if I just can change the rc.conf file back, it will stop doing this at least but I don't even know how to do that.

Is there any way to change my rc.conf file back to the way it was or is all hope lost and I need to completely reinstall freebsd (the initial install took about 6 hours on my incredibly slow machine.)

 

[Beastie]

4 GB of HDD space may well be enough. It all depends on your needs.

The error is simply HAL not liking your CD drive very much. Just disable device polling on it (# hal-disable-polling --device /dev/acd0).

But even if you don't do this, you could always switch to another virtual console (e.g. alt+F2), log in and try xinit or startx from there.

What window manager are you using? Maybe you don't even need HAL and D-Bus...

BTW, a 6-hours setup is abnormally high. Why's that? iPAQs have 500Mhz PIII/Celeron CPUs. That's very fast for FreeBSD. You could have a fully operational setup in less than an hour with a 300Mhz!

 

[SirDice]

BTW, a 6-hours setup is abnormally high. Why's that? iPAQs have 500Mhz PIII/Celeron CPUs. That's very fast for FreeBSD. You could have a fully operational setup in less than an hour with a 300Mhz!

Not if you build Xorg from source

4GB is a bit on the small side if you want a reasonable functional desktop like Gnome. I'd stick to either console only or use a small window manager. Xfce might just about fit but Openbox or something similar might be better suited.

I'd also install x11/xorg-minimal instead of the full Xorg. Install using packages as you simply do not have enough room for building relatively big ports like Xorg.

 

[Beastie]

Not if you build Xorg from source

or is all hope lost and I need to completely reinstall freebsd (the initial install took about 6 hours on my incredibly slow machine.)

I thought he was talking about the FreeBSD setup only...
But Xorg would take days and many more GBs of HDD space to be built on such a machine. :\

 

[phoenix]

At the loader menu, select "Single-user mode".

This will load the kernel, mount the / filesystem in read-only mode, and drop you to either a root shell or prompt you for the root password and then dro pyou to a root shell.

Mount the / filesystem in read-write mode (mount -u /).

If /usr is a separate filesystem, mount it as well (mount /usr).

Then edit /etc/rc.conf (ee /etc/rc.conf).

And, finally, reboot (shutdown -r now).

 

[Zare]

Disable dbus and hald, insert Option "AllowEmptyInput" "Off" in ServerLayout section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf.