New Workstation

I'm blogging from my shiny new FreeBSD 7.1 workstation. This is probably not of general interest: I'm using my blog to document how I built this workstation, as there were some hiccups along the road, and maybe some other poor soul will find it useful to know how I worked around them.

So this workstation is a Dell Optiplex 760. It's running a 3GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4 GB RAM and two 215 GB hard drives.

So I installed FreeBSD 7.1 from the DVD image via BitTorrent. I followed the instructions on ish and got it booting into a root filesystem on ZFS. Note that the instructions suggest first installing into a 1GB UFS partition, but I found 500MB more than enough room.

So now my filesystem looks like:

> df -h
Filesystem                 Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
tank/root                  213G    165M    213G     0%    /
devfs                      1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
tank/tmp                   213G    128K    213G     0%    /tmp
tank/usr                   214G    456M    213G     0%    /usr
tank/usr/home              218G    4.3G    213G     2%    /usr/home
tank/usr/local             216G    2.6G    213G     1%    /usr/local
tank/usr/ports             216G    2.4G    213G     1%    /usr/ports
tank/usr/ports/packages    215G    1.2G    213G     1%    /usr/ports/packages
tank/var                   213G     38M    213G     0%    /var
> cat /etc/fstab 
# Device  Mountpoint FStype Options  Dump Pass#
/dev/ad8s1b  none  swap sw  0 0
/dev/ad10s1b  none  swap sw  0 0
/dev/ad8s1a  /  ufs rw  1 1
/dev/acd0  /cdrom  cd9660 ro,noauto 0 0

The zpool labelled "tank" is actually mirrored across both hard drives:

> sudo zpool status
Password:
  pool: tank
 state: ONLINE
 scrub: none requested
config:

 NAME         STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
 tank         ONLINE       0     0     0
   mirror     ONLINE       0     0     0
     ad8s1d   ONLINE       0     0     0
     ad10s1d  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

I haven't yet mirrored the boot partitions between the drives, but I do have both swap partitions enabled, which I suspect is actually too much swap.

The real difficulty was in getting my dual monitor configuration to work. Without a configuration file, Xorg started the monitors in mirrored mode. After I ran

Xorg -configure

the monitors came up with much better resolution, but were still mirrored. Thus began a rather tedious "let's configure X" session that involved a great deal of Google searches and too many false leads.

The final breakthrough came when I found a post on a message board (which I can't find now) and read through the manpage for the Radeon driver a few times. Here's what I did:

1. I started xfce4 with the automatically-created Xorg configuration.


2. I used xrandr to discover what monitors the driver saw:
   

   
   > xrandr
   Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 3200 x 1200, maximum 3200 x 1200
   TV_7PIN_DIN disconnected
   DVI-I_1/digital connected 1600x1200+0+0 367mm x 275mm
      1600x1200      60.0*+   59.9  
      1280x1024      75.0     59.9  
      1152x864       74.9  
      1024x768       75.1     60.0  
      800x600        75.0     60.3  
      640x480        75.0     60.0  
      720x400        70.1  
   DVI-I_1/analog disconnected
   DVI-I_2/digital connected 1600x1200+1600+0 367mm x 275mm
      1600x1200      60.0*+   59.9  
      1280x1024      75.0     59.9  
      1152x864       74.9  
      1024x768       75.1     60.0  
      800x600        75.0     60.3  
      640x480        75.0     60.0  
      720x400        70.1  
   DVI-I_2/analog disconnected
   

   
   



3. I used xrandr to turn the monitors off and on, and to arrange them side-by-side to my liking, paying attention to the warnings it gave me.


4. I wrote the new configuration to the Xorg configuration file:
   

   
   > cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf
   Section "Files"
    RgbPath      "/usr/local/share/X11/rgb"
    ModulePath   "/usr/local/lib/xorg/modules"
    FontPath     "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/misc/"
    FontPath     "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/"
    FontPath     "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/OTF"
    FontPath     "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/"
    FontPath     "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/"
    FontPath     "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/"
   EndSection
   
   Section "Module"
    Load  "GLcore"
    Load  "extmod"
    Load  "record"
    Load  "glx"
    Load  "xtrap"
    Load  "dri"
    Load  "dbe"
    Load  "freetype"
    Load  "type1"
   EndSection
   
   Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier  "Keyboard0"
    Driver      "kbd"
   EndSection
   
   Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier  "Mouse0"
    Driver      "mouse"
    Option     "Protocol" "auto"
    Option     "Device" "/dev/sysmouse"
    Option     "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
   EndSection
   
   Section "Monitor"
    Identifier   "leftMonitor"
    VendorName   "Dell"
    ModelName    "Dell 2007FP"
    Option       "DPMS" "on"
   EndSection
   
   Section "Monitor"
    Identifier   "rightMonitor"
    VendorName   "Dell"
    ModelName    "Dell 2007FP"
    Option       "DPMS" "on"
    Option       "RightOf" "leftMonitor"
   EndSection
   
   Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Card0"
    Driver      "radeonhd"
    VendorName  "ATI Technologies Inc"
    BoardName   "Unknown Board"
    BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
    Option      "Monitor-DVI-I_1/digital" "leftMonitor"
    Option      "Monitor-DVI-I_2/digital" "rightMonitor"
   EndSection
   
   Section "Screen"
    Identifier "Screen0"
    Device     "Card0"
    Monitor    "leftMonitor"
    Monitor    "rightMonitor"
    DefaultDepth 24
    SubSection "Display"
     Viewport   0 0
     Depth     24
     Virtual  3200 1200
    EndSubSection
   EndSection
   

   
   

Notice I don't have two video cards listed: I simply have both monitors listed as options on the one card. Notice also the names are "Monitor-DVI-I_1/digital" and "Monitor-DVI-I_2/digital" on the card. Apparently the driver probes them as "DVI-I_1/digital" and "DVI-I_2/digital", and Xorg prepends those strings with "Monitor-".

My new setup is working perfectly now.

The one problem I haven't totally resolved is the USB mouse and keyboard. The mouse wasn't working at all (a Logitech MX Laser wireless) until I plugged it into a USB port on the back of the box. Then there was contention with the keyboard, where one or the other would spontaneously stop working. I finally got them to work together, almost consistently, by plugging them both in the back, the keyboard to the right of the mouse. I'm not 100% sure this is fixed, but it's working fairly reliably now.

I did have to twiddle some things in /etc/rc.conf, and got some help from sysinstall on that too:

> sed -n -e '/^[^#]/p' /etc/rc.conf 
zfs_enable="YES"
hostname="********************"
ifconfig_em0="DHCP"
usbd_enable="YES"
sshd_enable="YES" 
fusefs_enable="YES" 
moused_port="/dev/ums0"
moused_type="auto"
moused_enable="YES"
ntpdate_flags="-b***************"
ntpdate_enable="YES"
nfs_client_enable="YES"

FreeBSD has come a long way since I started using it in the 4.0-RELEASE days. It's been a couiple years since I've messed with it, and it's not been disappointing to return. I'm looking forward to a long and productive relationship with this great operating system.

I'm not done yet: I have some Perl modules and some ASDF packages to install, as well as migrating PGP and ssh keys from my MacBook. But we're well on the way here.

And I'm having a blast.