Yes, it's working fine again but I had some unexpected errors/problems/barriers on the way ........ well' I suppose errors are never really expected as if you had expected them, you would do something to prevent them.
Anyway, on the way to getting FreeBSD 8.2 to boot to my new Gnome2 Desktop, an error showed up in the verbose output stating
myhostname sm-mta[803]: My unqualified host name (myhostname) unknown; sleeping for retry
At this stage it "slept" for perhaps a minute and then lead me to Gnome's greeter page.
Now I have installed FreeBSD many times and on different computers and have never seen this before.
Seems that it's related to sendmail which I don't use and have never used.
Luckily the solution for me was very easy as indicated in this thread.
You just need to add this line to /etc/rc.conf
sendmail_enable="NONE"
Note, however, that you may need to re-mount your / slice as RW (read-write) before you can make this change to /etc/rc.conf.
But, again, this is very easy. Both of these commands work for me:
# mount -urw /
# mount -o rw /
The second problem I had was more surprising. On the greeter page, my keyboard worked as I had to type in my password.
However, on the Desktop itself, although the keyboard worked enough for me to type in a few letters into a terminal, it just died after that. And, this happened over and over.
Googling didn't show up similar problems so I was very puzzled. I even changed batteries in my wireless keyboard but this made no difference.
Interestingly, if I went to single-user mode, the keyboard worked perfectly.
Could it be that the X server was somehow messing up my keyboard?
So, I installed the nVidia driver for my card (GeForce 7300 LE) which was the NVIDIA-FreeBSD-x86-280.13.
Actually, getting this to download and install it without a keyboard was no mean feat but I like a challenge.
In addition, I used the nvidia-xconfig app to create and install /etc/xorg.conf for me.
Then on reboot, my keyboard worked perfectly. Indeed, I'm writing this post in FreeBSD.
I'm not convinced that their wasn't some link between this problem and the unknown hostname problem I mentioned earlier.
This time around, I don't think I'll bother installing the compiz 3D effects as they do slow things down (particularly boot and shutdown times).
So, rather than AWN that I had used before (which only works with compositing), I'm using the Cairo-Dock this time. See screenshot to see how good it looks even without compositing.
No comments:
Post a Comment