recovering from the 6.3 xorg mess

[peter stern]

I'd appreciate suggestions on how to get a working xorg from the mess 6.3 
shipped with. I've been using FreeBSD since 2.2 and have never had much 
trouble with it until the 6 branch was released. My hardware is pretty 
generic Intel brand D865 motherboard, matrox g550 video. I don't customize 
the kernel. I do clean installs not upgrades.

The xorg in 6.3 doesn't install much in the way of required drivers. I got 
the mouse and keyboard drivers installed and also the mga driver. I have 
run xorgconfig to create what seems like a working xorg.conf. Startx 
brings up twm but only in 640x480. I cannot change modes. And yes, I have 
mode lines defined. If I put the correct horizontal and vertical scan 
rates in for my Viewsonic PT810 monitor, I get a screen display with lines 
precessing through it. xdm gives the same result.

I have tried the other suggestions on configuring X in the FreeBSD 
handbook, including creating a basic xorg.conf. It tests okay but only in 
640x480 and it has no modelines in the .conf. Adding modelines doesn't fix 
the problem.

The initial install was done by sysinstall under the predefined 
xdeveloper selection. I tried reinstalling xorg from ports by running make 
deinstall and make reinstall but with no change in behavior.

My hardware has no problems running Slackware 12 or Openbsd 4.2. Under 
those OSs, X11 works fine and configures without problems.

What has happened to quality control in the FreeBSD release?

peter