FreeBSD 8.0 on an old IBM Thinkpad
This one was some adventure...
I'm going to mention something out of order but it is best to do this first. If anyone wants to get graphics working on this machine they first need to realise xorg (the graphics program) does something nasty with the keyboard. This is not universal across all machines. It turns the numlock on. Not a big thing if you don't need the right side of your keyboard... After much research I found the solution is to install a program called numlockx from /usr/ports/X11. Installing a package from the ports is as easy as "make build" and if it completes successfully, "make install".
The next thing to do is to configure xorg from the root account. This is the sequence for that "Xorg -configure" then "cp /root/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf". Within that the following lines need to be added to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to enable the mouse and keyboard (NOTE: I am using single quotes instead of double quotes because the double quotes are used in the commands) 'hald_enable="YES"' and 'dbus_enable="YES"'.
Almost ready to to into xorg... There are still some things to do first. It is a good idea to enable the sequence in order to force quit xorg. Add this command to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file... "setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp". Finally as a user add the following to the end of the .xinitrc file in the users home directory... "numlockx off".
Incidentally, configuring the sound follows the same procedure as outlined in a previous post.
Although going into Xorg is possible at this point most people prefer to install a more substantial window manager such as Gnome or KDE. These can be found in the /usr/ports directories. My personal preference is KDE. The procedure for KDE 3.x is given in the previous post I mentioned. To start KDE 4.x the following command is inserted into the first line of the users .xinitrc file... "exec /usr/local/kde4/bin/startkde".
At this point the GUI is ready to run. On this particular machine I found it took all day to install Firefox. OpenOffice was a memory hog and wouldn't install. The alternative was KOffice. That worked decently well. I wanted to install some other programs but there wasn't much I could do with a 10GB hard drive... I gave up on it as a lost cause and returned it to the recycling folks.
I'm going to mention something out of order but it is best to do this first. If anyone wants to get graphics working on this machine they first need to realise xorg (the graphics program) does something nasty with the keyboard. This is not universal across all machines. It turns the numlock on. Not a big thing if you don't need the right side of your keyboard... After much research I found the solution is to install a program called numlockx from /usr/ports/X11. Installing a package from the ports is as easy as "make build" and if it completes successfully, "make install".
The next thing to do is to configure xorg from the root account. This is the sequence for that "Xorg -configure" then "cp /root/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf". Within that the following lines need to be added to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to enable the mouse and keyboard (NOTE: I am using single quotes instead of double quotes because the double quotes are used in the commands) 'hald_enable="YES"' and 'dbus_enable="YES"'.
Almost ready to to into xorg... There are still some things to do first. It is a good idea to enable the
Incidentally, configuring the sound follows the same procedure as outlined in a previous post.
Although going into Xorg is possible at this point most people prefer to install a more substantial window manager such as Gnome or KDE. These can be found in the /usr/ports directories. My personal preference is KDE. The procedure for KDE 3.x is given in the previous post I mentioned. To start KDE 4.x the following command is inserted into the first line of the users .xinitrc file... "exec /usr/local/kde4/bin/startkde".
At this point the GUI is ready to run. On this particular machine I found it took all day to install Firefox. OpenOffice was a memory hog and wouldn't install. The alternative was KOffice. That worked decently well. I wanted to install some other programs but there wasn't much I could do with a 10GB hard drive... I gave up on it as a lost cause and returned it to the recycling folks.
posted by Mike at 3:31 p.m.
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