Hello all, I have an old PC (266 MHz PII, 64 MB ram, 4.3Gig drive,S3 Virge PCI video card, Compaq 1024 15" monitor) that I use as an intranet server. In the past I've installed and run FreeBSD 4.2 and 4.4 on it with no real trouble. I just installed FreeBSD 4.6 (iso's downloaded from www.linuxiso.org . Yes, I checked the md5sums!)
I had a couple of problems with the FreeBSD 4.6 install. First, the X configuration failed during the automated installation - and during my two subsequent attempts at fresh re-installs. I then dug out my copy of "The FreeBSD Handbook" and, running as root, successfully configured X and KDE 3 manually by editing XF86Config and .xinitrc . I now have one remaining big problem: while "startx" works perfectly when I log in as root, it crashes if I am logged in as a regular user. Here are the error messages: ---------------------error messages follow------------- Xauth:(argv):1: bad display name "FreeBSD_box.homelan.org:0" in "list" command. Xauth:(argv):1: bad display name "FreeBSD_box.homelan.org:0" in "add" command. Fatal Server error: Cannot open log file "/var/log/XFree86.0.log" <snip>report problems to [EMAIL PROTECTED] giving up. xinit: no such file or directory (errno 2): unable to connect to X server xinit:(argv):1:bad display name "FreeBSD_box.homelan.org:0" in "remove" command. --------------------end error messages----------- Note that the two initial Xauth warnings also show up when I (successfully) run startx as root, and so do the final two xinit errors. It seems as though the problem is the "Fatal Server error" due to log file not being opened. To check, I typed (while logged in as regular user, immediately after running startx and seeing the above errors): ls -l /var/log/XFree86.0.log -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 23287 Oct 5 22:41 /var/log/XFree86.0.log cat /var/log/XFree86.0.log <result :stream of stuff on screen - file exists, isn't corrupted, and contents are readable> Thinking it was an issue of write permission for non-root users, I tried doing "chmod g+w /var/log/XFree86.0.log" while logged in as root. This didn't fix the problem, now if I try to run startx as a regular (non-root) user I get a different fatal error message: Fatal Server error: xf86OpenConsole: server must be suid root I think I have now exhausted my (very limited!) Unix/FreeBSD/Linux knowledge. Anyone have suggestions? I don't really want to be running as root any time I want X, especially on a machine which is permanently connected to the internet... TIA, -John Carri To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
