Saturday, February 23, 2008

FreeBSD progress

A lot of progress on FreeBSD today (as VM under Ubuntu) as I managed to get it up and running with Gnome/Internet.
Looking very good and glad to be finally learning about this renowned OS.
Unfortunatly, had a problem at the end of the day which I can't explain. This is that the keyboard appears to stop properly functioning. Indeed, of all the keys, only n, j and e print normally. The majority don't print anything at all.
Strangely, when I need to login to the gnome screen, I have no problem typing my name and password. It seems to be that after this, the keyboard goes crazy.
Funny thing is that it was OK earlier on
Also, keyboard works fine in Haiku on same VMware Server.
Seems like there's a configuration problem.

*************
Solved
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Actually, I've just solved this by going to System>Preferences>Keyboard>Layouts.
Here only UK was present and, I think, not highlighted. So, I clicked in the radio button and I got my keyboard back.

Edit (25/02/08)
In fact, the fix described above was only temporary. he loss of keyboard functionality is a frequent occurrence in FreeBSD VM and in general it can only be revived by rebooting.

One strange thing happened today in that I couldn't go to FullScreen in VMware Server with FreeBSD. When I tried I go an error message saying

Unable to find an appropriate host video mode
Adding the guest mode to the "display" subsection of the "screen" section of your
/etc/X11/XF86Config and restarting X is likely to help

In fact, this was due to the fact that I had missed out on the last step of the X-server install/config procedure.
I got this from here and in summary it's:
1. Install xorg
2. configure xorg
3. copy xorg.conf.new from /root to /etc/X11/xorg.conf
When I carried out this last step, I was able to get FullScreen without problems.

Another importan item is how to be able to use "su" command. This is explained here.
A more abbreviated expalnation of FreeBSD installationa and initial configuration are available here and here.

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