Since it’s now officially in the FreeBSD ports tree, I decided to upgrade my work desktop to Xorg 7.2 today. The process is mostly painless as long as you are a good user and follow all the steps in /usr/ports/UPDATING – everyone reads that before upgrading anything, right?, right? ;)

The only gotcha I came across related to the modular nature of Xorg, mainly the “where’s my $DRIVER gone to?!” problem. To be honest I’d forgotten about this part even though 7.x has been out for a while, and I probably came across it on various Gentoo upgrades in the past. Running “startx” will simply dump you back out to the console with complaints about not being able to find your keyboard or mouse driver.

However it was pretty easy to infer what the problem was. In the caveats section of the Xorg UPDATING notes they mention you should probably have the x11/xorg meta-port installed. If you don’t have this installed (like me), it’s more than likely Xorg won’t start first go since it’s basically missing all the necessary modules required to load properly. So unless you don’t mind using X without luxuries like a keyboard or mouse you’d better install some drivers.

Luckily these are all packaged up nicely, I simply had to do:

portinstall x11-drivers/xf86-input-keyboard
portinstall xf86-input-mouse
portinstall xf86-video-ati*

* Replace that with your video card – you can probably guess the correct driver to install by looking at /usr/ports/x11-drivers

But..there was still another issue to tackle. Fonts. These are now also their own separate package. When starting X it appeared to get a little further, however it died just before loading the window manager with a message about not being able to find the “fixed” font. So, another portinstall was required:


portinstall xorg-fonts

3rd time lucky, now I have a working Xorg 7.2 install.