X Configuration Woes

[Jerold McAllister]

Arindam writes: 

> 
>> I am an absolute FreeBSD Newbie and I decided to give it a try over a
>> lazy weekend - mainly because I don't want to throw away my old PIII
>> box. I picked up FreeBSD 5.4 which was all I got and I am dual booting
>> it with RHEL4.3. My box is rather old ... P3 733 Mhz with 256 megs of
>> SDRAM at 100MHz, and I installed FreeBSD on the first 6.5 Gigs of my
>> Seagate harddrive ... connected to the Primary master IDE interface. 
>> 

Well, installing FreeBSD for the first time is more compatible with
an ambitious weekend than an lazy one - as you probably have discovered.
It does take considerable work, though the rewards are commensurate. 

>> ....
>> If you can wade through this gibberish, please help. 
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Andy
> 
> Some updates: 
> 
> Following this I did a fresh install using the FreeBSD6.1 CD1. Xorg
> installed is 6.9.0.
> I did not run xorgconfig or anything. There was no /etc/X11/xorg.conf
> either. From the command-line I ran "xdm" and the GUI started ... I
> could login ... and then that's about it. 
> 
> 1. The Mouse still does not work ... may be I should try MouseSystems 
> protocol.

I can't say much about the mouse.   I usually let it figure out
things itself and it works.  Is it a plain ps2 mouse (with round ps2
connector)?   I just do the mouse test during sysinstall and it works. 

> 2. What should I do about GNOME / KDE etc. I am not aching to get a
> jazzy a GUI on my FreeBSD installation. I can make do with a very
> minimal one. But I want a minimal one at least now, I just have to get
> this running or I can't sleep.

If you don't want a fancy GUI desktop, then skip KDE and Gnome. 

I prefer to use Afterstep.   It installs nicely.
It is found in ports at    /usr/ports/x11-wm/afterstep
It can be a little confusing at first to set up and configure - as are
all X things - but after getting it configured for me, it gives me what I
need: several windows for logging in to various hosts, a button to bring
up Firefoxand X support for whatever I run, such as OpenOffice or Xpdf
or Xmahjongg and a couple of other games, etc. 

The only thing I haven't managed to my liking is getting it to create
anchor buttons for each thing when I bring it up.  It only does so for the
minimized windows.   I got that in one version, but it seemed to mess up
the focus control and click to bring forward action so I gave up on that. 

I edited:   /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc
to make it work my way.   I think you can make individual .xinitrc files
in home directories as well, but I wanted mine to work for all of my
small handful of accounts so I edited the main one. 

Have fun, 

////jerry 

> Cheers,
> Andy
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