recovering from the 6.3 xorg mess

[Pieter de Goeje]

On Monday 17 March 2008, Robert Chalmers wrote:
> Well, I suppose this will eventually get to the original poster.
>
> I too have just gone through this nightmare. But, I short circuited it all.
>
> I went to a clean install of 7.0-RELEASE.
>
> Ah ha. Easy. Nope.  The gremlins were waiting.
>
> So basically here's what I did.
>
> When I loaded the new system, I installed EVERYTHING I could enable. If
> there was an option, I installed it.
> Beautiful.
> Rebooted - X blah blah blah .... of course not.
> Fiddled with the xogconfig and made lots of xorg.config attempts, then
> realised - looking at the log - that it couldn't find the S3 driver. Yes,
> ancient S3 card in this box. All of 8 years old.
> So - took a clue from the log, and went into I think, like,
> ....xorg-drivers, and looked at the Makefile, which had everything in it. I
> commented out the things I would never need - mouses, and video - which is
> all that is in there, and left in the obvious ones, including some that
> "might come in handy one day" and typed
> Make install clean
> Now it all works. Well, as soon as I figure out some of the other mystical
> incantations - worse than World of War this lot.
>
> But bottom lline.
> Go into that xorg-driveers directory and check the Makefile, then "make
> install clean" and lots of things start happening.
>
>
> And I add - this is after a clean install where I said "Just do it" ... yea
> right. :-)
>
> Sorry I can't check those directories - I'm currently trying to port in VNC
> .... I live in hope.
> Robert

This is the reason why it is recommended to install x11/xorg. It will install 
all necessary drivers, servers, fonts and clients automatically. Installing 
x11-servers/xorg-server is not enough, because it doesn't install any drivers 
(it used to do this before Xorg 7 existed).

-- 
Pieter de Goeje