Gnome hangs with newly-installed FreeBSD 8.2

C

cdtidy

Hi folks,

I'm new to FreeBSD. I've used Solaris 9 on UltraSPARC machines for about 8 years, but now I need a similar operating system that runs on smaller, faster hardware. I need something with Apache, PHP and MySQL and I want Gnome. Also, I don't want to have to reinstall and update a lot, because I'd rather spend the time doing other stuff :-).

I've just installed FreeBSD 8.2 (AMD64) on a single-processor Pentium 4 HT 3.06 GHz system. It has 2 GB RAM, an 80 GB SATA disk, an Adaptec SCSI card and a 147 GB SCSI disk. It also has a DVD writer and USB wireless networking adaptor. The SATA disk also has a Windows XP partition, and the whole of the SCSI disk is NTFS, for files which both operating systems need to access.

The installation was fairly trouble-free (except that I wish there was an option which let me install everything Gnome-related together, instead of having to select the packages individually). I installed and configured the X server, and ran "startx" as root. Everything worked great. I logged in to Gnome as root and could use all my disks.

Then I rebooted, and I was no longer given the option to log in to Gnome as root. Towards the end of the installation, I had accepted the suggestion to create another user account, and this was now the only account offered on the Gnome log in screen. I tried logging in as root, but it didn't work. And now when I log in to Gnome, everything hangs. The mouse cursor will hardly move and I can hear the machine accessing my SCSI hard drive. In the end, I had to switch the machine off, which caused problems with the file system which "yes ¦ fsck" won't fix (someone's going to tell me I shouldn't use that command, I know).

I suspect Gnome is spending time trying (and failing) to access some of my hardware. I pulled out the wireless USB adaptor and rebooted, but that didn't fix the problem. I haven't got a lot to lose, that is, I can easily reinstall everything if I need to. But I'd rather understand the problem and not have to run as root. My Sun Ultras never used to hang like this. Can anyone help me solve the problem? Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Best wishes,

Chris Tidy
 
ahavatar said:
In my case, I just followed the instructions in this page. Take a look if you haven't.

http://www.freebsd.org//gnome/docs/faq2.html#q1
Click to expand...

Thanks. I took a look at that page last night, but couldn't see a clear solution there.

To add a little information, the mouse cursor is sometimes going berserk today. It doesn't move at first, then it goes crazy and clicks on things even when I haven't used the mouse buttons. Interestingly, I have seen this problem on a PC running Windows XP in the past. The only similarity is that both machines had an Adaptec SCSI card, although not even the same card. Can anyone see why there would be a connection?

Also, when the file system was corrupted and I had to use the command line to fix it, my keyboard layout was changed back to the US layout (I had chosen a German layout during installation). Any idea how to fix this?

Many thanks,

Chris
 
cdtidy said:
The installation was fairly trouble-free (except that I wish there was an option which let me install everything Gnome-related together, instead of having to select the packages individually).
Click to expand...

Like x11/gnome2?

In the end, I had to switch the machine off, which caused problems with the file system which "yes ¦ fsck" won't fix (someone's going to tell me I shouldn't use that command, I know).
Click to expand...

# fsck -y -t ufs

I suspect Gnome is spending time trying (and failing) to access some of my hardware.
Click to expand...

Doubtful, but I don't know.
 
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