Monster Mash

Whatever you do, don't try this at home! I was trying to rebuild something (it was so long ago I don't even remember what it was!), when I interrupted the process because I needed to reboot. That's one thing with ports - you go to build something and it needs something else and before you know it, you're an hour into the building process and no idea how much longer it is going to take. So I killed the portmanager build, logged out and rebooted.

Well, KDE wouldn't start up, complaining of a missing library. Since I tend to muck about a great deal with my system, I don't have a graphical login screen (gdm or kdm). I log in and then run startx. That way, if my X setup is screwed up, I at least can easily make changes and get logged in. And in this case, KDE complained. So I thought, well, I just rebuild KDE. What was I thinking? The simple command :

# portmanager x11/kde -l

began its work late Wednesday evening and didn't finish until this (Friday!) morning. And even then, important pieces like kdelibs didn't rebuild, for reasons I don't know. One problem I was having was that my machine was freezing after a very short time. I suspected the special 80x60 text mode I had the text console in, as I had noticed if I swapped to it while running X (via the Ctrl-Alt-F2 keystroke), my machine would freeze after a bit. Sure enough, after I put it back into the standard 80x25 video mode via # vidcontrol 80x25 command, it stopped freezing up. So now I'm wondering if that was the cause of some of my other display freezes. Something to be investigated.

Then I restarted the port build (oh man, thanks be to Zeus for the --resume option in portmanager, as the kde port looks at upwards of almost 200 ports!) and went to bed. Thursday morning I was greeted with the sight of a menu from some random library asking for me to pick a single option. I'm not sure if I can do -dBATCH with portmanager, but I'm certainly going to have to find out. Another problem with the options screens for many ports is that you have no idea what they are talking about. Usually it enables some obscure acronym, and you have no idea what the pros and cons for each option are. So I usually just pick the default anyway. So I did in this case, and build trundled on.

And on. And on. Mysterious build commands whizzed by the screen all day long. By mid-afternoon, I got an option screen for KDE asking which KDE apps to install. I once again had a brain cramp and allowed it to install all of them. So dozens more apps that I don't want and don't need, like KOffice, got installed. Then, right around dinner time, it stopped scrolling, as it seemed to be linking some app. So I let it hang around for over two hours, and nothing changed. I couldn't even ctrl-C out of it, as the keystrokes just echoed to the screen. So I ctrl-Z'ed out of it, putting it in the background, and then killed it. But I forgot to check the log file before restarting the build, so I'm not even sure where it hung up.

And that build trundled on, Finally, just this morning it finished, although an important piece, kdelibs, failed to build for some reason. I just didn't have the intestinal fortitude to try and build it again, so here I am with some kind of Frankenstein system, which is seasonally appropriate at least.. Now I can't wait for PC-BSD 1.3 to come out, and I'll just start anew!