fryol
FBSD Install Notes: configuring X, kde, completely autostarting & grub

Finally, I got X server up and running with kde 3.5.

  • Installed kde-3.5 from ports using pkg_add -r kde3
  • After a lot of hassles, I started up kde through an entry into my .bash_profile by doing a startx: 
    • if ! ps auxww|grep X|grep -v grep >/dev/null; then startx; fi;
  • Also, added  a symlink:  start-x11vnc@ -> /usr/local/bin/x11vnc
  • Grub wasn’t starting up since FreeBSD wrote it’s own boot0 into MBR. So I to install GRUB into MBR, I had to go explicitly into GRUB and do: 
    • grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
..found in hd0,1
grub> setup (hd0)
  • One other important thing I had to do in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file (and that is in my ext2 Linux partition), was to add the FreeBSD entry which looked like: 
    • title FreeBSD
   root (hd0,a)
   chainloader +1 # `kernel /boot/loader` did not work for me
   boot
  • Contrary to what most manuals said (that I could do a kernel /boot/loader  instead), I had to do a chainloader. Biggest reason why I had to make grub reside in the MBR instead of the FreeBSD boot0 image was that doing 
    • sudo boot0cfg -s 2 /dev/ad2
  • ..never worked for me. It would keep on hanging until I pressed F5 so that it would go to Disk0 and then I had to press F1 or F2 again to select either Linux or FreeBSD boot up. So it wasn’t automated and may be it has something to do with the way my disks are setup (or that my BIOS is a pre-1999 thing).
  • Then, sendmail was stuffing in it’s nose (with errors like, can’t find my qualified hostname)  so I had to completely disable that too.  This is where I found all the lines to do that.
  • Doing an autlogin into the system was also one of my requirements, so I had to add the following into /etc/gettytab (where someuser is the username I wanted FreeBSD to autostart with): 
    • # autologin entry for someuser
alsomeuser:\
 :al=someuser:ht:np:sp#115200:
  • Then, to complete the autologin stuff, I had to add this (actually replace ttyv7 line)  into /etc/ttys 
    • ttyv7 "/usr/libexec/getty alsomeuser"  cons25  on  secure

At the end of the day, I had a completely autostarting FreeBSD system that would enable me to login remotely through either vnc client or through ssh.