(ETA, Extreme TechBeanie Alert)
I finally got some X love.
Man it was close. Saturday morning I got up early to give this sucker one more chance. I got my copy of Ubunto with all its distributions in the mail earlier this week, my credit card was itching to go buy another drive and do a dual boot with Ubunto and leave FreeBSD and Xorg behind. Screw'm. They have really pissed me off.
Yesterday morning around seven, I made coffee and sat down for one more Saturday of struggle. X wouldn't configure as usual and I suspected the GeForce 7600GS card just wasn't supported by the nv drivers. I came to this utterly obvious conclusion sometime around two. I pulled it out and plugged the monitor into the mobo video subsystem. I went through the handbook instructions (using lynx on another terminal) step by step as I had dozens of times in the morning and last week, ever since the dsl and natd stuff was taken care of. Suddenly there it was. It was such a shock I just stared at the screen with the grey weave and the little black X. I was dumbfounded. I tentatively wiggled the mouse and the X moved. I'll be damned. I tried the crt-alt-(minus/plus) keys to change screen resolutions from default 1920x1440 on down to 1024x768 and back where I might be able to actually read text and sure enough it worked. This config was using the VESA driver rather than the i810 which is technically what is on the Intel mobo. I sure wasn't going to chase down all the bullshit required to get i810 driver up---maybe later.
Around three I hit a nasty snag trying to install xfm. Xfm was so deprecated that some of its dependencies were missing. So, rather than get burned out for another unknown number of bleary days and sleepless nights, I started gnome instead. Fucking-A there it was, complete with Mozilla FireFox, and so forth. Can't believe it. Thought of ravi, immediately.
Sorting through the ports (which is difficult on CLI) on the gnome file browser I found a whole nvidia section---where sometime in the future I can go experiment with the drivers and see if any of them support the video card. Sure would nice to run hdtv, view and copy movie rental dvd's and make my own movie library... Yet another terrorist plot to overthrow the capitalist state of the United States of Amerkkia.
Sunday afternoon is time to reflect about this long trek. The FreeBSD crew made some very bad decisions between 4.x and 6.x and they are going to pay dearly, if they haven't already in their once upon a time great standing in the tech beanie community. As far as I can tell the 5.x versions meandered around in nowhere while making the jump from 4.x to 5.x a major hurdle, so that when I finally got around to upgrading from 4.x to 6.x it was a huge deal.
I can understand a lot of the reasons, but some are just arcane nonsense. For example most of the important configuration files in /etc hide the defaults in separate subdirectories, then present front end files with a similar name, that are linked to the defaults. The booting process reads the defaults, then the front end file and re-configures the default settings. The rational is that modifying a file that in turn modifies a default file makes it more difficult to screw up your system or lose the default (and theoretically workable) configuration. The downside is the front ends usually don't have all the possible options you might want to install--and you need a fair amount of background and familiarity with the particular version to know what's not there. This annoyance is particularly severe with sendmail. Sendmail's configuration has always been a mystic journey into a foreboding jungle of strange,and now it is just stranger than strange.
In the default version of FreeBSD 6.2, sendmail is tweaked to be the sort of crippled mta that M$uck systems use---as if it were operating on a single box with no direct access to the internet. The rational is that many typical users are not on a network and usually run their box through an isp. Well, like me. But I got used to tweaking sendmail so that I appear to sendmail to be my isp, through a masquerade---which is handy because my isp runs FreeBSD---so for sendmail, I look like just another box on the same remote network. But the new default 6.2 uses some kind of twiddle file, nsswitch.conf that in turn modifies the host.conf...something...something, that is handed off to some modified local copy of sendmail...something...somthing...to make sendmail believe it works as usual, but of course it doesn't--it works like whatever crap is under M$uck's OutLook. I couldn't figure out what the FreeBSD crew did, so I deleted all that crap and ran straight sendmail with a traditional masquerade. But jesus h.christ was it frustrating.
FreeBSD's implementation of apic seems to me to be a nightmare without end. I am not sure how to explain it, but whatever tweaking they did to make the irq's work created a huge problem that effectively drove me to go to DSL just of avoid figuring out what was going on in the old serial port system. My isp uses a direct connection with a fixed address so even PPPoE is avoided and there is no DHLC bullshit to worry about.Hence my venture into natd.
On the other hand 6.2 uses an Intel mobo probe facility (part of apic) during boot so you can read off devices plugged into the mobo in the boot message stream as long as its powered on (all captured in a /var/log/messages.log). I can tell there are all sorts of giant improvements in the underlying code. For example 6.2 runs flawlessly on the core2duo, and I can see both cpu's in top. Plugging in an device in one of the usb ports is reported on the CLI along with its manufacturer's name, date, serial number and some of its operating specs. The big problem is getting and configuring a virtual device driver to link the physical usb node to the OS device driver. Maybe that's not really the FreeBSD community's problem since they can't control whether manufacturers will release the i/o specs for their devices, or choose not to. The FreeBSD and Xorg configuration probes can only report the id and crude spec, but can't go beyond that. For example, nvidia evidently stopped releasing their full board specs with the release of their latest video cards---just my luck. So, that is why I spent hours and hours struggling to configure X.
But the deepest and most annoying and frustrating thing of all is that FreeBSD documentation lags behind its releases by at least one or two major revisions. What made my life these last two months such a nightmare was that the books that came with the full CD bundle were relevant to 4.x and 5.x and had little or nothing about 6.x. So, even if I was once upon a time a great believer in RTF, I was lost. The printed user and administrator guides were almost worthless, because there had been enough key changes to make the documentation significantly out of date. The live system included the most uptodate version of the Handbook, but even it was worthless for understanding the changes to sendmail, the sio0 driver, apic nightmares, configuring a printer, and other standard tasks. Oh, and I forgot to mention Emacs, my essential life line to all text went through its own upgrade. Thanks to some genius twit at gnu, it now has a default blinking curser. Thanks asshole. And of course the emacs crowd is ten times more snotty, conceited, and terse than any FreeBSD guru could ever hope to be.
The email lists gave various ways to stop the stupid cursor from blinking, but none of them worked. What is it with these people?
But I am here in gnome to report that evolution sucks and is an obvious clone of a clone of the old StarOffice email client that was later cloned into OutLook, suitably rename OutBack or OutHouse by wankers in the free world. Thankfully gnome is just a fancy window manager and supports my favorite email client xfmail---which if the gods are with me tonight, yes the sun has gone down while we were here...will get this off to LBO.
Hopefully all the dark nights of despare are behind me. Late this afternoon I turned the old box off, unhooked it from the network hub, the phone line, the AC power, and packed it away. Maybe I will find a nice AT box with power suppy and revive it just because it was my favorite computer of all time. The apartment is suddenly quiet for the first time in months.