Great Installation (FreeBSD 9.2, X.Org, KDE4)

[rhsbsd]

Dell Inspirion 8500 laptop (x86, 2 GHz, P4m CPU, firewire, legacy, Intel) dual boot with XP Pro.

I just love the Dolphin "search" feature that you can drag your cursor over "save" and then see the directory tree for that specific search. I just love it to death. My son played with a "graphing" program for hours, I had to kick him off my box.

Just a few things, this being:

1. I installed successfully on the third attempt because the target at /usr/ports/X11/Xorg/ is a perfectly defined "PACKAGE". I looked in there before my third uneventful install which I started off with this /usr/ports/X11/Xorg/ pkg install. The first two installations, using /usr/ports/X11/Xorg/ make install clean, both crashed and burned trying to instantiate Xorg. Main symptoms included the following: X.Org appeared to install flawlessly, Xorg -configure did NOTHING. I will repeat: NOTHING, startx did this

   xinit unable to run server

   and
   

   unable to connect to xserver:connection refused

   and a few others. It also looked like a Perl parser was missing or could not be found. Gee I guess the previous command really did fail. While whizzing along (third install) the KDE4 install, and, on the supposed final reboot, up comes the KDE4 login. Beautiful, I'm in, it's done, NOT YET! This leads me to:
2. During the bsd FreeBSD 9.2 install I did not get prompted to create another user other than the root user. KDE4 login will not accept root login. This is a good time to have a liquor drink. Not a problem either. Just pause boot at end of the bsd FreeBSD 9.2 install and choose single user option. This eventually leads you to your prompt (using "root" login) and make modifications as required.

A malfunctioning pointer stick on my keyboard required coding xorg.conf so that my mouse actually had control of my cursor. I forgot about that. Its an old box.

I installed using a hardwired and resident "Broadcom" NIC because bsd FreeBSD saw my PCMCIA slot but did not do anything with the Linksys NIC in that slot. If your machine is using Intel go to their site and they have a slew of utilities to properly configure your BIOS. DO THIS FIRST. KDE4 logs and dmesg confirmed that my resident old 4x Radeon was clocked about two ticks below melting point. My display is better now than it has ever looked. I saw all the Radeon posts and I'm still wondering what that was all about.

This platform rocks. My brother has been expounding on the virtues of Unix for years. I guess he's right. I can supply more info if need be.

 

[Deleted member 9563]

Re: Great Installation (bsdfree 9.2, Xorg, ked4)

Well done @rhsbsd. Yes, there's a few things that are easy to miss with an install until one gets used to it, but it looks like you managed very well anyway. I too am using FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE with KDE-4. It's a great desktop system, although for my usage KDE-4 seems to be a little less versatile than KDE 3.x was.

As for adding a user at install time, I've missed that too, but the question should be there. Also, about your non-result of Xorg -configure, did you look in /root? You should see a file named xorg.conf.new which you then move to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

 

[rhsbsd]

Thanks O.J,
I tried FreeBSD 10.0 initially, but, was not sure it would even work with a 32 bit machine. It did not for me. That install did not respond correctly while trying to manually partion hard drive. The gooey which handles partition sizes/types would not accept keyboard input during install. Whats up with that? To answer your question /root/xorg.conf.new was not there after executing xorg -configure. As i previously stated nothing happened after Xorg -configure, least i did not see anything. Just in case your wondering i did check the MD5's on all my CD images and they were exactly as reported. I did not have to move anything or do any of the fixes to get xorg to start after using pkg install. Everything just seemed to work.
I'm just happy it did work out.