Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 10:51:12 -0700 (MST) From: "Terry R. Friedrichsen" <terry@uplift.hosp.misyshealthcare.com> To: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Subject: Alpha vs. FreeBSD 5.4 vs. X Message-ID: <200507151751.j6FHpCYt002344@uplift.hosp.misyshealthcare.com>
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I don't expect anybody to know what's really going on here; all I really want is for somebody to drop me mail that says "yeah, don't bother trying to run X on DS10 FreeBSD 5.4/Alpha; it doesn't work" or "X works just fine on DS10 FreeBSD 5.4/Alpha; you're a bonehead". So here's my story: I am having loads and loads of trouble trying to get X to run on a DS10. The filesystems are solid as a rock as long as I'm not trying to use X, and flakier than a box of Kellogg's the instant I try to run the Xorg server. I've hammered the disks hard and long without X running, and everything works great. First, trying to run X will hang the system, generally even before the xdm login screen comes up. But, one magical time, it came up, let me log in, ran the window manager, and executed my .xsesion file perfectly. It promptly hung at the first command I typed into an xterm window. The disk activity light was solid on ... Power-cycling to reboot hung when xdm fired up, and I've never gotten past it again. (Oh, yeah, I rerun "-configure" because power-cycling the machine so thoroughly damages the filesystems that I have to reinstall from the CD. This situation, while still a problem, has been *greatly* reduced by turning off soft-updates for /usr - and I've turned off background fsck's, else the damaged filesystems wouldn't even permit booting.) Sometimes "Xorg -configure" will complete; sometimes it will go away forever. When it goes away forever, Xorg.0.log is totally empty, although a few lines of output *do* appear on the screen (but just the first few telling me what the various line abbreviations mean). I've followed the Handbook stuff on configuring X, when I can actually get "-configure" to work". As nearly as I can tell from reading reams of documentation, I seem to be doing everything right. And, of course, there was that one magical time when it all worked perfectly ... Finally, it's not the disk drive: I've installed FreeBSD on both da0 and da1. The first power-cycle while booted on da1 rendered da1 un- bootable. da0 has, with difficulty, survived all of the abuse so far. To eliminate the SCSI bus, I installed FreeBSD on an ATA drive. That actually failed; after exploding all of the packages like Perl, the fonts, etc., it says something like "Attempting to install all selected distributions" and hangs there forever. I tried that twice, with the same results both times; this screen normally only appears for about 2 seconds. Well, anyway, if somebody could just take the time to let me know whe- ther this is all *supposed* to work or whether I'm just wasting my time, I'd appreciate it. Terry R. Friedrichsen terry@uplift.hosp.misyshealthcare.com
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