Up grading ports, Xorg et all

[doug at safeport.com]

I messed up a KDE 3.5.10 trying to install firefox3 so I thought I would attempt 
to upgrade using portupgrade and/or portmaster. After a lot of work I think I am 
back to if you use KDE the only way to upgrade is to start afresh.

At this point I thought I would try Xorg 7.4. I did a "pkg_delete -a" and 
"pkg_add -r xorg". This was a complete disaster. After trying all the 
configuration options, tips etc in the handbook, google et all, I decided my 3+ 
year old thinkpad was just not supported so I composed a "can anyone help me" 
email to questions. This went off into the ether through user error.

While I was waiting for help I thought I would try installing Xorg from an iso 
image. The resulting install worked out of the box using the last variation of 
xorf.conf I had tried. I am left to assume that what I got from pkg_add does not 
fit together. Obviously my earlier attempts to get an xorg.conf file worked 
fine. The code did not. As a thought to the Xorg, I do not think the unbundling 
makes things more stable. Xfree86 was bad enough (so I thought) with its couple 
of dozen (or so) components. Starting from scratch I now have 204 ports and two 
versions of python just to run twm. Given that some number of the 204 component 
are under active development using pkg_add seems out of the question. The second 
version of python came in because I could not find xdm in the 7.2-release disk1 
iso so I did a pkg_add on xdm.

Aside from venting a bit, my message is the Xorg set from a release iso probably 
has a better chance of working if you run into problems. I do not own or have 
access to any systems that could build Xorg or KDE in less than a month so I 
am clueless if building from source would have worked any better.



_____
Douglas Denault
http://www.safeport.com
support at safeport.com
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