Upgrade Away!

While the upgrade from PC-BSD 1.2 to 1.3.0.1 was not without its complications, it does seem to have worked out in the end. So I'm currently running PC-BSD, v1.3.0.1. Yay!

The first time I installed the 1.3.0.1 PBI, I fired it up and waited until it got started. Once it began to install various packages, I switched away to my work computer and forgot about it until the computer started to make a sickly beeping noise. I switched back over to my PC-BSD machine, and found a blank screen and frozen keyboard. The computer was beeping steadily and nothing could be done. So, with much trepidation, I hit the Reset button (I refuse to build a computer that doesn't have a reset button) and hoped for the best.

I was surprised that it booted okay, but not surprised I was still getting PC-BSD 1.2 when I did a uname -a. I did notice a few differences, and when I went to Settings -> System Administration -> PC-BSD System Manager (new name), I was told I was running PC-BSD 1.3.01 (sic). Hmm, that meant, again not surprisingly, my machine was in some kind of upgrade limbo. Oh oh.

And I continued to be unsurprised when I clicked on my CD drive and was told that HAL was required. HAL, or Hardware Abstraction Layer, was a bit of a controversial decision to bring into PC-BSD and requires some daemons that obviously weren't running. I tried running the /usr/local/etc/rc.d/hald script but it didn't run. These days, in order for any daemon to run, it has to be explicitly enabled in /etc/rc.conf. So I added:

hald_enable="YES"

to my file and then it complained about a couple of other daemons not enabled correctly so I added:

dbus_enable="YES"

polkitd_enable="YES"

This seemed to help but there were still some problems, so I decided to try and re-install the patch PBI. Of course, it immediately informed me that it would only upgrade a 1.2 system. Looking at the /Programs/Patch1.2-1.3.01/PBI.FirstRun.sh file, I see where it got the version number via the PBReg program. I guess this sets up some kind of registry thing. So I just typed in PBReg set /PC-BSD/Version 1.2, and tried again.

This time I watched much more closely and it all went along pretty smoothly. I did not like how it just rebooted the computer when it finished though. It should at least ask you to click a button before rebooting, in case there is some work that needs to be saved. Luckily, I had closed everything else before beginning this install.

It rebooted fine and, lo and behold, I was now running PC-BSD 1.3:

$ uname -a

FreeBSD PCBSD.localhost 6.1-RELEASE-p11 FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE-p11 #3: Wed Dec 20 18:51:13 PST 2006 root@PCBSD.localhost:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/PCBSDv1.3 i386


But when I started X, I got a rude surprise - the upgrade had silently deleted my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file! My carefully crafted dual monitor xorg.conf file! Yikes! Luckily, I had an xorg.conf~ file still there, and it was reasonably intact, so I was able to recover from the problem. I did notice that one of the last packages installed during the upgrade was a new version of Xorg (xorg-server 6.9.0_5, to be exact), so I had hopes that perhaps my crash problem when I used 24 bit color depth would be fixed. But alas and alack, not to be. KDE still hangs when I try to use it in 24 bit mode with the dual monitors. I think, though, that fluxbox worked fine. So that may drive me even more to try out another window manager.

But it definitely should never have overwritten such a precious configuration file without at least saving a backup. If there's one file whose changes you don't want to lose, it's the X config file! I've created a few different backups this time myself.

So things are working okay. I can't seem to get any from an audio CD though. I get sound just fine when playing sound files, but CDs don't seem to say anything. And I need to find an MP3 ripper so I can continue my work in ripping my cd collection.