Upgrading to FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE
I endeavoured to upgrade my old FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE system to brand new 10.1. As expected, this was a quite bumpy process, and below are a few things I had to find out the hard way.
Ports
Neither pkg update nor portupgrade can update all ports.
I had to dump all origins, remove all ports, then reinstall
everything manually.
Linuxulator
New CentOS-6 based linux_base requires sysctl:
compat.linux.osrelease=2.6.18
X11
New Xorg
As of Apr. 16, 2014, the X server has been upgraded to a new release. From https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/WITH_NEW_XORG:
```plain linenos:false Note that there’s a know regression with syscons and kernel video drivers: you can’t switch back to a console once an X.Org session is started. A new console driver called vt(4) fixes this issue while bringing nice features. It’s available in FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE and 10.1-RELEASE but isn’t enabled by default. To enable it, put the following line in your /boot/loader.conf: kern.vty=vt
It is a real shame that users essentially have no choice but
switching from the default syscons to the "new" (unfinished,
far from functionally complete) vt console driver.
The X mouse cursor occasionnally disappears for some unidentified
reason. Alt-Tab brings it back.
DRI
---
Both GDM and the GNOME desktop now require DRI access. At least
for ATI video cards, this means that user `gdm`, as well as anyone
logging in to a GNOME session, must have access to `/dev/dri/card0`:
``` plain /etc/devfs.rules linenos:false
add path 'dri/card0 mode 0666
GDM
Gdm won’t work out of the box (black screen):
gdm_lang cannot be set to a non-UTF-8 locale anymore
(if the month name in the current date contains an accent,
the greeter will abort). Time to bite the UTF-8 bullet, then.
Oh, and I can’t just remove the variable altogether, see below.
Keymap
Interesting issue for GNOME users. I found out that the GDM login screen would always revert to US layout, no matter what. Initially I thought the X server had an incorrect keymap due to HAL device enumeration, so I added the following to my setup:
```xml /usr/local/share/hal/fdi/policy/99local/10-x11-keymap.fdi <?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”ISO-8859-1”?>
However this happened to be a total red herring, as by default the
port configures Xorg to use devd, not HAL. For devd, I
[found out](http://olivier.cochard.me/bidouillage/installation-et-configuration-de-freebsd-comme-poste-de-travail#TOC-Configuration-de-la-langue-du-clavier-sans-HAL)
this is achieved
using xorg.conf options:
Section “InputClass” Identifier “Keyboard Defauls” Driver “keyboard” MatchIsKeyboard “on” Option “XkbLayout” “fr” EndSection
But all of this was mostly irrelevant for my setup since I add
AutoAddDevices turned off in the X server setup, and the correct
layout was hardcoded in xorg.conf. And indeed,
starting it with startx yields the expected French layout.
However, it appears that gnome-shell considers that whatever keymap
is configured in the X server probably must be unsuitable, and
changes it on its own to a better default based on the current locale
(or "us" if no locale is set for gdm).
Printing
========
I am using an HP MFP1217nfw network printer, which requires the proprietary
`print/hplip` and `print/hplip-plugin` packages. These install `print/cups` as
a dependency. `print/cups-filters` is not installed as a dependency, but
is required anyway, or all print operations will fail with:
D [02/Mar/2015:22:24:01 +0100] Print-Job client-error-document-format-not-supported: Unsupported format “application/pdf”. ```