Setting up xorg, the quick and dirty method (was "Removal of sysinstall from HEAD and lack of a post-install configuration tool")

From: Garrett Cooper <yanegomi_at_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 14:36:28 -0800
(Splitting off one part of the thread to be relevant to the right
group; moving x11 mailing list to BCC)

On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 1:59 PM, Pedro Giffuni <pfg_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
> Hello;
>
> --- Gio 29/12/11, Chris Rees <crees_at_freebsd.org> ha scritto:
>
>> >
>> > I use the nvidia driver, no idea what people with ATI
>> > cards do.
>>
>> I'm sorry to hear you're having trouble with that, if you
>> ever want to try again and you can't work it out get me
>> off list ;)
>>
>
> Getting X11 to run on virtualbox from a FreeBSD 9.0 CD
> installation is pretty much a nightmare. Is there something
> about it in the users handbook? A wiki page about setting up
> X11 on FreeBSD would do it too. Perhaps we should write one.

There is a chapter in the handbook [1], but what I've learned from the
last go-around setting up X11 4 months ago, is that it's smart to do:

cd x11/xorg
make config-recursive
make install
# An hour or so passes by on a fast machine
echo 'dbus_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf
echo 'hald_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf
service dbus start
service hald start
startx

That's it. Generally no configuration is required for X.org to work on
hardware (in fact I'm not using an xorg.conf right now. after I
blasted away my packages due to the CURRENT 9 -> 10 major version
bump..).

You'll need to pimp your install to do non-standard stuff via
nvidia-settings, not use hald, etc, but the X.org supplied method
seems to work the majority of the time if you have standard hardware,
compared to the hoops one needed to go through when setting up XFree86
or earlier versions of X.org.

Cheers,
-Garrett

1. http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x-config.html
Received on Thu Dec 29 2011 - 21:36:29 UTC

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