For Christ's sake. I have an IBM X41 laptop, which was happily running FreeBSD 7.1. Having a little free time this evening I decided to update it to 7.2. The upgrade failed miserably so I had to install from scratch. But that's OK, because I had backed up the machine beforehand.
The install went through fine (via NFS after PXE boot - no CDROM on this box). And then I get to X. As this is a minor update I go to use the old Xorg config which worked fine. No joy. I get the dreaded "No screens found" error, although the screen is there of course. After trying X -configure several times, tweaking, etc., I get nowhere slowly. i810 is now just intel, but whatever. The screen comes up, but no mouse or keyboard. After yet much more fiddling and tweaking I finally get to the crux of the problem: fricking HAL. Having installed this from scratch using the X User defaults I might have expected that something that is now required to get the flipping keyboard and mouse working would be enabled by the installer. But no, I have to waste time on this crap just to get back to where I was before. Oh, and HAL uses 6MB or so of RAM. Not a lot. But as I already specify the hardware in the Xorg conf file it is, as far as I can see, an unnecessary waste. I thought it would be easy, but no, it's just a pain. It's wasn't unsolvable, as I have years of fiddling with UNIX and FreeBSD in particular. But for effing Christ's sake. I know this isn't specifically a FreeBSD problem, HAL being needed by X. But the flipping installer should enable it when I selected X flipping User from the install options. My little upgrade has now turned from a bit of fun into a saga that I don't want to go through again. I had to get this off my chest. It was, as they say, doing my head in. MF. _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
