Any BSD users on board?

[trotsky]

I'm running FreeBSD 4.11 on my server and a laptop - just started banging around with the portupgrade utility. Dang, it's nice.

[bemildred]

1. Running 5.3 on one, 4.8 on another.

:hi:

[trotsky]

2. How do you like 5.x?

I've been thinking of trying it out.

[bemildred]

3. If I had it to do over, I'd probably stick with 4.xx for now.

Wait for say 5.7 or so. It was like the first "stable" release
on the 5 branch and it shows here & there. But I was building a
new box and feeling ambitious, and I have it banged into shape now.

An example: I installed XFree86 cause I used to work on it and I'm
used to it instead of X.org, and it linked in the wrong reentrant
shared C library, both libc_r and pthreads, in the libGL library,
and that caused certain programs I'm fond of to puke on startup,
and it took a few days to sort that out and hack it up the way I
wanted it. This is spose to be fixed in 5.4 from what I read.

The port tree is not as flawless as in the 4.xx branch, yet.

And you know, they always insist on changing things ...

If you had a need for SMP or the like, I expect it's worth it.

[trotsky]

4. My 4.10 updated to 4.11 on my last buildworld.

It's been unbelievably stable, but I still ran into the occasional ports tree issue. Trying to upgrade Mozilla to 1.7.5 forced me to update xfce from 4.0.6 to 4.2.0, which mostly broke xfce (I can't launch any programs other than a terminal window). Portupgrade didn't fix it. What's your preferred window manager? I tried enlightenment but it seemed a little excessive.

[bemildred]

5. Yeah, you understand.

I usually just pull the sources and build it manually if the port fails,
with however much fooling around is needed. I actually like that
sometimes, it's more work, but you can tailor to suit. I got a 120
Gig drive now, so I can keep all the tarballs I want.

But with some of the ports like mplayer or mozilla it's just too messy
and you want the port to work right.

I use olvwm, but it's a private hack. I keep the sources and hack
them up when I have to, nobody supports it. I used to code a lot
of X stuff.

When forced out into the real world I use twm if the situation is
primitive or KDE if it's not. Fvwm is OK. There are lots actually,
you don't have to go the desktop environment route if you don't want
to.

I have Mozilla 1.7.2, which is a bit buggy, but workable. It seemed
to prefer GTK1.

I've heard of xfce but not fiddled with it. Just looking at the page
it looks nice, I tend to like things minimal and configurable, and
they developers sound cluefull in the sense I like.

I just pulled the tarball. We'll see what happens. If I do anything
with it I'll comment here.

[bemildred]

6. Your symptoms sound like what you get from xinit/startx when

it can't find a window manager. You have some sort
of broken configuration. I can probably help you debug it
if you want to take the time.

I've been building xfce here this morning, it seems to be
BSD friendly and builds fine so far ...

[trotsky]

7. Yeah, 4.0.6 went in like a dream.

Don't know why 4.2.0 is acting up. I've just started messing around with it, so I appreciate your offer to help! When I have some hard data to share I'll let you know.

[bemildred]

8. It's looking for "gnome-config" and puking on that.

I'm still fiddling with it.

[trotsky]

9. Hey, I fixed my problem.

I had to delete all my xfce4 config stuff. In .config, .cache, .xfce4. Not until it was all gone and it rebuilt me with the default session did everything behave.

Not having a complicated desktop, this is not a big setback for me. But still a pain.

To troubleshoot, I created a new login and ran xfce on it, and it came up with no problems. So you were right, it was definitely an issue with my config, but I doubt I'll take the time to figure out exactly what.

[bemildred]

10. OK, it went like this (on 5.3):

I installed the gnome2 package from ports.
I suspect now I didn't need to do that, but who can say?

I had to hack one dependency in a library, a coding error.
A file named "vtefc.c" where I had to change a reference to
FC_WIDTH to FC_CHAR_WIDTH. After that it was fine.

I installed the xfce package, 3.8.18, no problems.

I installed the xfce4 package, it hung on libxfceutil.
Found the package for that under /usr/ports/x11 and installed it.
Then the xfce4 package went ahead and built and installed fine.

It seems to be the case that xfce and xfce4 are separate and you
can install both.

Now I have to figure out how to use it.

[Sgent]

11. I don't have an active machine

but used it in the past (and will in the future) for servers. For my desktop, I like linux; however, for servers, a varient of BSD is the way to go.

Also, have any of you tried Gentoo? Its a lot like BSD (good package and library management, self compiles).

[bemildred]

12. It would not be of interest, as I'm not running Linux right now.

But I took the time to look them up, and it seems like
a similar idea to the ports collection. In any case, thanks
for taking the time to point it out.

[Fleurs du Mal]

14. I also run Gentoo

at work for the Oracle support. Great...for linux.

[Fleurs du Mal]

13. Yes

I run FreeBSD current on my workstations and a few servers, 5-stable on the rest.