FreeBSD 8.0 and KDE 4.4

By finndo On March 19, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Continuing on from my last post, it was really quite simple to get KDE to run after I closed that post.  in fact I only had to type in 2 lines and the second one ran KDE.

 

exec /usr/local/kde4/bin/startkde4 > ~/.xinitrc startx

 

BAM! that was [...]

Continuing on from my last post, it was really quite simple to get KDE to run after I closed that post.  in fact I only had to type in 2 lines and the second one ran KDE.

 

  1. exec /usr/local/kde4/bin/startkde4 > ~/.xinitrc
  2. startx

 

BAM! that was it, finally!! after 2.5 years of trying I could not believe it was so simple… and then I noticed… I had no KB or Mouse… I did not know it was possible to be so happy and so sad at the same time…

 

You can search the inet any way you want and you’ll find out that running “X -configure” will generate your xorg.conf.new file that you then have to move to “/usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf “   one more item to note, when you test this, make sure you type “X -retro” or “Xorg -retro” else you will just get a blank screen.

*****WARNING*****ok, now that I got your attention, you must run the following command before attempting to use your xorg.conf in the previously mentioned location or you will lock your system up and have to hit the power button. “sudo chmod root:wheel /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf“  if you do not have sudo installed, you have 3 choices.

 

  1. login as root (something I never do except to add my user id to the sudoers file)
  2. type “su -” and switch to root
  3. login as root and type “pkg_add -r sudo” then either add yourself to the wheel group or add yourself to the sudoers file

 

there are several ways to add yourself to the wheel group, the only one that sticks out in my mind right now that I can vouch for is “pw moduser [username] -G wheel [username]” this one sets your group to wheel AND your default group [username], if you skip the second [username] you will no longer have access to any of your own files or you can type “pw groupmod wheel -m [username]” should do the same, to add yourself to the sudoers file you need to type “visudo” then you will be in vi, here is what to do if you don’t know vi.

 

  1. press ”/” (initiates a search)
  2. type “root” (tells vi what to search for)
  3. press enter (begins the search process)
  4. press “n” (takes you to the next instance of “root”)
  5. press “o” (creates a new blank line under the current one and starts editing)
  6. type [username] [tab] “ALL=(ALL) ALL“  (make sure you use caps on the “ALL”, this allows [username] to use sudo)
  7. press ESC (stops edit mode)
  8. press “:” (informs vi you wish to enter a command)
  9. type “wq!” (tells vi to “write” the current file to disk and “quit” vi “NOW”
  10. press enter (executes the command you have entered

 

Now you will no longer have to log in as root on your machine, or su to root again.  Back to my problems…  So, I ran the dreaded -configure command (dreaded because after running it on any system in the last 2-3 years the only result I have ever gotten is the blank black screen syndrome) and of course, I got exactly what I was expecting… a blank black screen when I tested X with that config file.  This is the reason I did not switch to FreeBSD instead of windows back when FreeBSD 6.1 was released, I could never get beyond this point.  Well, about a days worth of inet searching and I have come across some useful information that “worked” for several users.  Nothing worked for me (feel free to search the issue and you’ll get a lovely list of others having this issue, some getting off easy, some giving up, some finding alternate ways to do it.)  about 15 minutes ago (not that you will know when that was based off my posting time, but it makes sense to say it that way…) I found a lovely forum post on FreeBSD.org, now when you look at that post you may not be surprised by what you see there, it is fairly common troubleshooting and common knowledge about the workings of FreeBSD and X.org; HOWEVER!!! and here is the kicker, it has in it a code snippet of the ever elusive “ServerFlags” section of  xorg.conf, something that apparently is not auto generated and really is not documented well (additionally other posts I saw told you to stick it in the “ServerLayout” section, which only causes X to crash without loading.)  I added the following to my xorg.conf file:

 

  1. Section “ServerFlags”
  2.                 Option “AllowEmptyInput” “off”
  3. EndSection
  4. Section “InputDevice”
  5.                 Identifier   “Keyboard0″
  6.                 Driver         ”kbd”
  7.                 Option “XkbOptions” “terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp”
  8. EndSection

 

Now, if you ran “X -configure” lines 4, 5, 6, and 8 should already be in there.  Lines 1 – 3 allow my mouse to work in X, and line 7 allows me to hit ctrl+alt+bksp to exit X and both worked!!  So I quickly exited X and tried “startx” and sure enough, KDE loaded, I could see it, and my mouse worked!!  hot dog!!

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just some interesting news I found online…

By finndo On December 1, 2009 · Leave a Comment

not too much content this time (unless I get carried away again).  couple of neat articles I read today (not the most trusted sources for news, but you have to make your own decisions… (both the things I started this post to talk about came from blogs.zdnet.com [...]

not too much content this time (unless I get carried away again).  couple of neat articles I read today (not the most trusted sources for news, but you have to make your own decisions… (both the things I started this post to talk about came from blogs.zdnet.com ) (another note, all links on my site “SHOULD” open in new windows, for some reason they never implemented “open link in a new tab” feature to HTML, or I just haven’t found it yet)

VirtualBox 3.1 - has been released with it’s new “big” feature… “teleport”.  some people might recognize this as being extremely similar to IBM’s Power System’s Live Partition Mobility.  in a nutshell this means:

Partition mobility provides the ability to move a logical partition from one system to another.  Live (or active) partition mobility allows you to move a running logical partition, including its operating system and applications, from one system to another.  The applications do not need to be shut down.  Inactive partition mobility allows you to move a powered off (or deactivated) logical partition from one system to another.

Live Partition Mobility
Live partition mobility allows you to migrate running AIX and Linux partitions and their hosted applications from one physical server to another without disrupting the infrastructured services.  The migration operation, which takes just a few seconds, maintains complete transactional integrity.  The migration transfers the entire system environment, including processor state, memory, attached virtual devices, and connected users.

(actually quoted from the IBM training manual for IBM course AU78 “System p LPAR and Virtualization II: Implementing Advanced Configurations”  a training class I took in July of this year) and so it goes on… (I guess I just killed the “no long post” part at the beginning…)  This has to be the coolest thing I have ever seen/witnessed/done in my life.  I setup an LPAR (logical partition) on a System p server, installed AIX 6.1 on it, then while another person in the training class was logged in and doing something in the server, I migrated it to another physical machine in less than 15 minutes with less than 5 seconds of down time (monitored with a CPU and HDD activity monitors running on the virtual server and a custom script that basically played the worm game and changed colors when the host system changed so we knew when it had actually made the switch)

Words cannot describe watching a multi-gigabyte installation of a server migrate to another physical box and keep working with less than 5 seconds of down time over the course of 12-15 minutes.  I am guilty of not having checked the total used size of the data drive, so I do not know how large the transfer was).  now to have this option in a freeware app that I can run on my Quad-core at home is very cool.  Especially since VirtualBox is currently my VM-app of choice.  Don’t get me wrong, I do/have used Virtual PC from Microsoft quite a good bit, but the configuration options and multiple VHD file format compatibility make VirtualBox the winner in that contest hands down.  Also, I have nothing against VMWare personally; however it is intensely confusing to go from Virtual PC to a VMWare workstation application and figure out what is going on and how to set it up without going back to “what already works… and is simple to use.”   Press release for VirtualBox 3.1

ok, after over 550 words, lets move on to the second half of my post (definitely not going to be a quick post… but then I always have a lot to say about stuff…)

OS and Web Browser share reports… Windows XP and Vista and MAC OS X are down, Win7 and Linux are up.  Firefox and IE8 usage are up, IE6 and IE7 are down, and everybody else, well no comment was made… original article is here on ZDNet - FYI how/where this info came from is sited on the ZDNet page.

right few comments about the above, first interesting how Firefox #’s are combined for all versions, does that mean Mozilla does a better job getting people to upgrade? or that Firefox users are less likely to fall very far behind on versions? same thing goes for the Safari #’s. yes Safari and Chrome are mentioned in the #’s, but no comments were made as to their rise or fall.

(completely unrelated, but I am listening to Pandora right now on my Sprint HTC Touch and they just played “Coloured Rain” by Slade, whom I have never heard before, at least not knowingly.  They are a British Rock band from the 70′s and I could have sworn it was The Beatles when it started playing…) (a note on that note, I Bing’d “wikipedia the beatles” and on the first page I got the Wikipedia page on the Beatles in the following languages, but not English… in order: sco, simple, nl, fr, ro, it.  I know what all of those are, except ro (Russian? it doesn’t look Russian)…  there were other results, including 2 Beatles albums’ pages on Wikipedia in English…)

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