Unhappy Xorg upgrade

[bf]

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.  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).  

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  ).

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).

Good luck, 
            b.