Unhappy Xorg upgrade

[Alex Goncharov]

,--- You/bf2006a (Sat, 31 Jan 2009 14:43:59 -0800 (PST)) ----*
| Alex:
| 
| I can understand your frustration.  The Xorg update, although it
| helps a lot of people, is inevitably going to cause problems for
| some, because it is run by so many people in different ways with a
| wide variety of hardware.  It's comparable in some ways to updating
| the OS, and despite the hard work by the FreeBSD Xorg team (and they
| did put in a lot of work), there are bound to be some difficulties.
| But all is not lost, even though you will have to spend some time
| recovering:
| 
| Yes, you can get the old versions of the ports: you can use cvs (in the
| base system) or the port ports-mgmt/portdowngrade (which is basically
| a wrapper for cvs) to checkout the old versions, which are still present
| in the cvs repository.

That's useful -- I didn't know about ports-mgmt/portdowngrade.  Thank
you!

| You can resume your automatic port updates, and then just copy the
| old versions of the Xorg ports over the new ones (having saved them
| in some other directory tree where they won't be overwritten by
| csup), or just not checkout the newer versions in the first place
| (for example, place all of the xorg ports in your refuse file, or
| just use cvs to checkout a list of individual installed ports that
| are not part of Xorg, rather than using csup collections).

Thank you again. Makes sense.

| Alternatively, you could download the entire cvs repository (both cvs and
| the latest versions of csup can do this) and checkout the versions you want
| from your local copy of the repository.  
|
| If you write a script to do this, the whole process won't take much longer
| than a normal csup update.
| 
| For more on this, read the cvs manual ( http://ximbiot.com/cvs/manual/ )
| or the relevant parts of the FreeBSD handbook (
| http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/anoncvs.html  ).

And again -- I'll explore this.

| In addition to the individual Xorg ports and metaports that you use, you
| will have to either use older versions of Mk/bsd.port.mk and
| Mk/bsd.xorg.mk, or use libmap.conf(5) to fool your ports into thinking
| that you have the new gl and xaw libraries installed.  Remember also that
| one or two of the old ports have disappeared (xorg-protos, for example).
| 
| For what it's worth, I used similar methods to use the new Xorg when
| it was still in Florent's git repository with the regular ports tree
| for several months.  Also, for some time I used the old xorg-server
| (1.4.x) with the other new Xorg ports without any obvious problems.
| And if the Xorg nv(4x) driver is giving you problems, you can try
| the Xorg vesa(4x) driver, or the nvidia drivers from ports
| (x11/nvidia-driver).

I think the most severe problem that I've had -- the keyboard key
codes read wrong on Dell Latitude -- is not related to a video driver.

But for the other issues, especially the noise in windows, trying
another driver makes sense.  A year ago I had a similar issue on a
different system with the `radeonhd' driver.  The the new driver was
released, it eliminated the noise completely.

| Good luck, 

Thanks a lot -- I'll slowly try all the things you suggested.

And I wish your instructions about the CVS and csup options were in
/usr/ports/DOWNGRADING :-)

-- Alex -- alex-goncharov at comcast.net --