Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2013 00:26:44 +0000 From: "Thomas Mueller" <mueller6724@bellsouth.net> To: freebsd-x11@freebsd.org Cc: Matthew Rezny <mrezny@hexaneinc.com>, Niclas Zeising <zeising@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: ports/156405: x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati driver: no hardware rendering Message-ID: <D5.8E.14028.4459E125@hrndva-omtalb.mail.rr.com>
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>From my previous post and Niclas Zeising's response: > > I had this type of problem with NetBSD 5.1_STABLE and 5.99.x even with native X that is part of the base system, as opposed to pkgsrc X. > I can't comment on how NetBSD does things, since I haven't used it. You aren't missing anything, judging from my experience. FreeBSD is decidedly more advanced. > > I could return to a text console in the dark and type "shutdown -r now" or even type the command to go back into X, successfully. > In general, this can work. It did last time I tested, but that was some > time ago so things might have changed. When I tried with new Xorg and KMS in 9-STABLE, my system froze immediately, not just the console. I finally managed to downgrade to the old Xorg after considerable difficulty. I'd like to try again on a new computer, with FreeBSD-current/HEAD (10.0 is in the not-so-distant future?). With 3 TB hard drive and GPT, I have plenty of space and partitions to experiment, and probably less hazardous than the stablest versions of NetBSD. > > With serial ports becoming obsolete, what can one use for or in place of a serial console? > FireWire. I haven't tested myself, but have a look at > http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/developers-handbook/kerneldebug-dcons.html > for instructions on how to use FireWire as a console. This still leaves the question of how to set it up in terms of hardware. I don't think there are any FireWire consoles. Would I plug anything into the motherboard's FireWire port? I just thought of FireWire-to-HDMI cable but haven't looked to see if these exist. > > Would it work to have two xorg.conf files, one with Intel driver and the other with vesa? Then could you go back to a working console when using the vesa driver? > Once you've loaded the KMS awawre kernel module, there is no way to get > the console back short of a reboot of the system. But would starting X with vesa driver load the KMS awawre kernel module? What about "xorg -configure" which I might want to do the first time? > > I've wondered (call it X acrobatics) how to switch between root and nonroot, and between window managers, without going back to text console. > You could try some sort of desktop manager, such as gdm or kdm. I've > not used them on FreeBSD, but on linux they make it possible to have > several users logged into X at once, and switching window manager, and > so on. As for root, it is generally considered a bad idea to run X as > root. If it's just a root terminal you need, you can always open an > xterm (or your favorite terminal emulator) and use su or sudo. > Regards! > -- > Niclas Zeising On Linux (Slackware) I was only able to have one user at a time using xdm. But I remember one menu item in KDE was konsole as root user (konsole is KDE's X terminal). On NetBSD, xdm completely failed to run. But I got some ideas from Gentoo Linux emailing list, haven't tried yet. Tom
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