by I recently installed 5.0 on my "main" box. I backed up all the data
and config, wiped, and installed 5.0 Release from floppy. The main
reason for this was to get support for a wireless Linksys pci card
that my existing install did not seem to detect (4.6.2).
Well, the first thing I ran into was not being able to get sound
working. Prior, I did a kldload snd_ess, IIRC. Also, I was surprised
that kernel build failed until I installed "sources for everything".
The next was what I'd call "X weirdness". The first one I saw was X
seizing when I ran startx (black screen) - but I only saw that
once. But that required a hard reboot. The next one I noticed was that
X is soooooo slow, but that *might* be related to a SpamAssassin
problem I noticed (see below). I mean, it takes sometimes a full
minute to alt-tab between a console and Mozilla, and I'm only running
blackbox with bbkeys, a few terms and Mozilla. The most recent seizing
of X was today: I ran startx, and tried to launch Mozilla. Well, I
could move the mouse (jerky redrawing of mouse, though) but no keys
seemed to do anything, not ctrl-alt-backspace, not ctrl-alt-f1,f2,
etc. Again, a hard reboot.
Regarding the spamassassin problem: I run spamd, and I saw a few times
where perl expands to over 300M, then an error gets spit out that the
process was killed because it ran out of swap space. This may just be
a perl/SpamAssassin thing though. SA is 2.53, perl is 5.6.1_11.
The last X seizing I had I wasn't even running SA at all,
though. Maybe it's just an "X thing", but it seems awfully strange all
these problems from all these apps suddenly exhibit themselves under
5.0. The X version "metaport" is reported from pkg_info as: 4.2.0_1,1
I think I'm just going to go back to 4.8; I saw someone reply to
another message of mine about the Linksys card and they said 4.7 saw
the card, IIRC, so I assume 4.8 would as well? I just wanted to know
if anyone else has had such grief. I've given it about 2 weeks now,
and it's just not working out for me. I understand it's bleeding edge,
but I have to say I'm surprised that it was this bad.
BTW, I did recompile kernel to try to get support for this wireless
card (the whole reason to do this in the first place. :)), and I don't
see anything in dmesg that reports the card being detected.
I'd like to find the most stable version of FreeBSD that can do these:
1. Support my wireless Linksys WPC11 PCI card (*)
2. Support my Palm pilot via jpilot.
3. Support Canon S40 (usb). (*)
4. Support my sound card. It's whatever Dell threw in this box, but it
worked under 4.4 and 4.6.2 with snd_ess, IIRC.
The ones with the star beside it never worked for me with 4.4, 4.6.2
or 5.0.
I'm open to suggestions for which version I should pick to get
these. Right now, I'm assuming it's 4.8 or 4.7, but it'd be nice to
get a heads up if that is not so.
Cheers and TIA,
--
http://users.americanisp.net/~seanleblanc/
"Mmmmm....pie pants"