question about xorg 7.4

[doug]

I have a IBM thinkpad T42p. xorg 7.4 is pretty much a disaster for me. First I 
wonder if anyone has gotten 7.4 to work on this or similar hardware. The system 
is 3+ years old when it was still IBM.

I have done this a time or two starting with the first version of KDE and 
FreeBSD 4.<something>. I believe I have tried all of the options in the handbook 
plus a couple of various from this list and google. So I was not going to add 
xdm and Xorg output, at first anyway.

The one thing I have not done is upgrade the BIOS and am not sure that matters. 
I was/am afraid of breaking an otherwise great system. It runs xorg 7.3 and 
KDE 3 or 4 fine. I go to this point because I broke things trying to install 
firefox3 and got all tangled up in upgrading ports and thought I would give xorg 
7.4 a try.

I am running FreeBSD 7.2. Xorg was installed using pkg_add on a system without 
any ports. Upon hitting the xdm trap, I also installed that package.

All variations give me a black screen with the keyboard locked. startx, xdm and 
xorg all do the same. I assume this is a hardware issue and hope someone found a 
way around it.

Thank you for any thoughts, tips, ideas, etc.