X marks the spot (or would seem to)

So, here I sit with a nonfunctional xorg. For some, this would be an inconvenience. For me, it renders DesktopBSD unusable at this point in my education, unless I can figure out why it’s not happy.

FWIW, I’m writing most of this post AS I try these different things to fix my xorg.conf. The only thing I’ve really done at this point is try to get some input from the folks at the DesktopBSD forum.

After getting some help from the folks at the DesktopBSD forums, I’m still not really clear on what to do, but it sounds like my immediate roadblock IS just Xorg.

Xorg.conf is nearly empty. Looking at xorg.conf as created (and successfully used) by PCLOS, I don’t know whether to think I could just grab the relevant bits and pop them into the xorg.conf for my DesktopBSD install or not.

I also don’t know whether I need to implement these options regarding use of the Nvidia driver.

And finally, I’m not sure whether this 2004 procedure on configuring X still applies, or is required in any way. Is xorg.conf barren looking because since I haven’t implemented the hints above, or because it hasn’t been configured yet? Or should it have gotten the info it needed at install time, meaning that something went wrong, but I should paste in the info from the PCLOS verison of xorg.conf?

First I tried single user mode to see if I could configure Xorg as per the manual. It didn’t seem to want to run. Given my previous problems trying to do much of anything from system mode on a not-quite-finished install, I didn’t spend much time trying to figure out whether there was some other way I could run it.

My next thought was to implement the “hint” and etc. linked above and/or using info from my PCLOS xorg.conf. Well, problem 1 is that ad0s2a, the partition with xorg.conf and devices.hints on it, can’t seem to be mounted rw using the remout rw tool in Frenzy. Both the other ufs partitions were remounted rw with no problem, as was my thumbdrive, but I can’t get it done with that partition, of course the one the one I really need access to.

I don’t know whether there’s some obvious security reason why this should not be writable (it would arguably make sense), or whether this is yet another symptom of whatever the DesktopBSD installer didn’t like about my system.

Either way, I’m at a halt again.

I’m still catching up my postings to events. This was mostly written as it happened, on Saturday the 12th, but not finished and posted until today.

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