Catchup Post

Catchup Post:

I’d done a bit of playing around prior to thinking of starting a blog, so this post will serve to tie in “stuff I didn’t journal” to “stuff I remembered to journal”. The hand off from this post to the other posts I’ve started to write will probably be a bit awkward, but once I all the drafts cleaned up and posted things should be a bit more consistent from this point forward.

Over the past 5 or 6 days I’ve been attempting to install DesktopBSD 1.6 onto my computer. The important details of my system are:

A64 “Newcastle” 3200+
2GB PC3200 RAM
Epox 8KDA3I motherboard
Nvidia 6600GT
Atheros 5212 based wireless card (I’ll add the brand and model when I can dig it up.)

Windows and PCLOS already each had their own drives, and bootloaders on those drives, before I began this process. As of now, I just pick which operating system to boot by picking the appropriate drive from a bios-provided menu every time I restart my computer.

For starters, the installer for DesktopBSD is fairly straightforward. However, if you are in my realm of ignorance regarding *BSD in general, I’d suggest you either bring up the DesktopBSD Installation Guide on another computer to follow through the process, or print it beforehand.

The only part of the install process that really required much thought was the partitioning section. I chose to install it into 20GB of free unformatted space which I created at the beginning of my primary IDE master drive. Neither Windows nor PCLOS boot from that drive, making it a good, safe choice for one so rife with ignorance and paranoia. For those coming from the windows or linux worlds, it may come as a surprise to see that the installer has you choose a “slice” of your drive for DesktopBSD, and appears graphically to create only a single partition, yet there are actually multiple partitions being created in the background. This is documented nicely, and in depth, in the FreeBSD Handbook.

A quick glimpse into the future — I eventually wind up giving FreeBSD a try. As a veteran of numerous Linux installs, and someone who has resized and otherwise messed with partitions on numerous “I’d hate to mess this up” installs of Windows both at home and at work, with reckless abandon, (and general success) I can tell you that partitioning under FreeBSD requires thought and knowledge of what the heck you are doing. I can tell you that for someone unfamiliar with the FreeBSD way of doing things the graphical, simplified partitioning interface used by DesktopBSD is a huge benefit.

For the most part, the installation went smoothly, the questions were easy to answer, and everything seemed hunky dory.

I’ve actually done this process several times now, so here are just a couple of tiny things I noticed — it seemed as if my monitor would go to standby if I walked away from the computer for too long during the install, and that it would sometimes not want to come back with a mouse wiggle or keyboard tap. This resulted in a couple of aborted installations. It may also be true that I was just not being patient enough, or expecting a responsiveness that the installer just couldn’t provide at whatever point it was in its activities.

On the three occasions where the installer seemed to complete successfully, it prompted me for a reboot at the end.

This is where the fun began.

Upon initial boot, the next step is apparently to configure different system options, including a root (system) password, setting up users, etc.

On my system, after selecting DesktopBSD from the bootloader, I would eventually get a blue DesktopBSD splash screen, then nothing. The system would fully hang, with my monitor displaying “No Signal”. No keyboard or mouse input would do anything, and I’d have to hard reboot.

Booting in “safe mode” or with ACPI disabled didn’t help. However when booting in safe mode I did note that the last line I saw before the hang related to xorg.

So, I thought maybe it was an xorg problem, and as I write this catchup post I still don’t know for sure.

Helpful folks at the DesktopBSD Forum and Section 5.4.3.2 of the FreeBSD Handbook both pointed me to logs located at /var/log/Xorg.0.log

My problem — how to get there on a nonfunctioning system, formatted with a filesystem that I didn’t know how to read from Linux or Windows.

The first suggestion was to try from single user (system) mode. No luck, which I now think is due to the fact that I had no way of actually logging on and/or due to the fact that setup wasn’t actually complete.

The next suggestion was to use Frenzy. Frenzy is a FreeBSD LiveCD with a large assortment of admin and security tools. I’d have to think that for an experienced FreeBSD user it would be a nearly indispensable tool to have around.
Frenzy is pretty nifty. After booting from the CD, a noobie-friendly environment was only a “startx” away, bringing me to a very functional XFCE desktop. XNC was a perfect graphical file manager for my purposes, Leafpad is essentially a notepad clone, and with these two tools I was ready to go digging.

Unfortunately, my logfiles did not exist.

However, after using another handy graphical tool to mount my USB thumbdrive as RW, I was able to copy off the (nearly empty) xorg.conf file, and to also grab var/log/messages.

My intent was to edit xorg.conf directly to try and fix the seeming problem. After googling these lines from var/log/messages :

NVRM: detected agp.ko, aborting NVIDIA AGP setup!

NVRM: RmInitAdapter failed! (0x25:0xffffffff:1009)

NVRM: rm_init_adapter() failed!

I found this discussion thread and many similar references, leading me to believe that I might need to edit devices.hints as well.

My plan, going into this past Saturday, was to attempt to create my own xorg.conf using my PCLOS as a reference (I wasn’t sure how well that would work out, but I thought it would be worth a try) and/or to experiment with devices.hints as noted in the discussion thread.

Next: Problems with X

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