xfree86 doesn't install

Dejan Lesjak dejan.lesjak at ijs.si
Tue May 10 12:58:58 PDT 2005


On Tuesday 10 of May 2005 04:19, sealbeam wrote:
> Hi
>
> I just bought FreeBSD 5.2.1 (retail version) and am having trouble with
> x-window. At the beginning of the install, I have chose All (install
> everything) and X-user. Neither of them seems to install xfree86. At least,
> I'm never presented with the "configure x-server now?" message, and if I do
> a post-installation "configure xfree86, a message says it's not installed.

Hmmm... 5.2.1 was rather a "development preview" release and is not quite 
supported any longer, so you might want to look into updating it.
Having said that, configuring X via sysinstall was rather clunky so it was 
even removed from there.
Having said that also, have a look at FreeBSD Handbook - chapters about 
installing and configuring X:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x-install.html
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x-config.html

To see if X is installed (I'm not quite sure what components of X sysinstall 
option X-user installs), you can use pkg_info(1) and if it is not see the 
above mentioned chapter on installing it as well as the Installing 
Applications: Packages and Ports chapter:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports.html

One other thing that is worth mentioning is that between 5.2.1 and now, the 
default X implementation has been changed from one provided by XFree86 to the 
one by Xorg. Therefore if you stick to defaults, when you later upgrade to 
newer release this is one more hurdle to overcome. Apart from that, many 
fixes have been made from that version to now and FreeBSD 5.4 has just been 
released yesterday. So if you have an option to burn a CD of newer release, 
it will most probably save you some trouble down the road.


Dejan


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