Mysterious crash/freeze in X11 with newcons

[Jean-Sébastien Pédron]

On 17.04.2014 14:39, Thomas Mueller wrote:
> Timing of crashes/freezes and /var/log/messages indicates the 
> messages were at crash time.

As Christian said, "VGA-1: EDID block 0 invalid." means that the kernel
driver couldn't understand what the monitor reported about its supported
modes. But do you use this VGA connector?

> I ran
>  pkg info -a | grep "mesa"
> and got nothing, also tried with "Mesa".

Mesa is split in multiple ports. You should at least have:
  graphics/libGL
  graphics/dri

> KDE in Slackware Linux had a menu item to open a konsole as root, 
> when KDE was entered as nonroot, so I figure a root window/uxterm
> must be possible.

Running a software as root isn't the responsability of X.Org here. This
is the responsability of your window manager or desktop environment (ie.
the one who allows you to start applications). If it doesn't provide a
menu or something, you could start your application from a terminal. For
example, from an uxterm:
  sudo myapplication

sudo isn't installed by default but is availble from the ports. After
installing it, you'll have to run "visudo" to configure who is allowed
to do what. For instance, there's a commented line which says:
%wheel  ALL=(ALL) ALL

If you uncomment it, it means that all members of the "wheel" group are
allowed to run a program as root, after entering their password. You'll
have to put yourself in the "wheel" group of course. After that, when
you run "sudo myapplication" from uxterm, it'll ask for your password
(not root's password) and start "myapplication" as root.

> I think I need an xorg.conf

X.Org is pretty good now at auto-configuring video cards and monitors.
If you are not using hald for input devices (hald is enabled by default
in x11-servers/xorg-server), then you need to setup your keymap in
xorg.conf. Otherwise, you shouldn't need any xorg.conf.

-- 
Jean-Sébastien Pédron

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 899 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-x11/attachments/20140424/f3e4fa18/attachment.sig>