[BUGS] Nightmare on X street :(

[Trevor Roydhouse]

I'd been happily running XFree86 for as long as I can recall, but its 
replacement with Xorg has been causing a growing number of issues with 
some X ports (partly it seems because some ports insist on various Gnome 
bits 'n pieces, which in turn insist on various Xorg bits 'n pieces), 
and so I reluctantly took the plunge, removed XFree86 and compiled and 
installed the latest and greatest Xorg-7.3. (Yes, I also removed and 
recompiled all my X apps.)

Within 20 minutes to 3 hours, if using X, the entire machine would 
lockup. No network, no mouse, no keyboard and, of course, no logs or 
error messages. I became re-acquainted with Lost+Found directories for 
the first time in years. The only obvious symptom of the lockup was that 
the usually solid green LED on the ATEN KVM (sucking power from the 
keyboard port) was reduced to flickering once the machine locked up. 
Significant?

Well, ok, maybe I was going to have to stick with XFree86, so I removed 
Xorg, downloaded the latest release (4.7.0) tarballs, compiled and 
installed. No way was it going to let me run the Xserver. It crashed 
(signal 11s) before making it to the desktop. No errors in the log file 
but, hey, at least it didn't lockup the machine.

So, I'm back to the ever-reliable XFree86-4.5 in the ports, replete with 
dire warnings that it's being removed from the ports after 25 December 2007.

FreeBSD shadow.sentry.org 6.3-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 6.3-PRERELEASE #39: Thu 
Nov  1 16:03:57 EST 2007 
xxxxxxxx at shadow.sentry.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/SHADOW  amd64

Asus A8V Deluxe motherboard, AMD 4200+ dual core CPU, 2Gb Corsair RAM, 
Nvidia FX 5500 256Mb AGP video card, Adaptec 29160 host adapter, 4 
Seagate SCSI drives.

Google didn't help and so, here I am. Any ideas, particularly, on why 
Xorg hates me so?

-- 
Trevor Roydhouse                            Mob  : 0415-448-273
BJuris, LLB, LLM (UNSW)
System Developer
Australasian Legal Information Institute    Web  : www.austlii.edu.au