Migrating to X11R7, Woes … and Victory

Finally got around to updating to modular X on my last computer, followed the excellent migration guide with no problems. Then it came to starting X.

Typing startx only resulted in errors relating to not being able to start DRI. This was strange, as I had never attempted to use DRI with 6.8 and it had worked fine. I decided it would be a good time to create a new xorg.conf, so I used xorgconfig to create one for me. Unfortunately I still got the error relating to DRI but X was starting up now.

Starting any heavy programs such as konqueror or firefox resulted in X being frozen, and requiring a hard reset. After whining about it on IRC and crashing my system some more, I decided to track down the issue and solve it :). Started by searching for forums for ‘VT3785’, and the thread Modular X, dri and the savage driver [solved] gave me some clues as to the problem. Rebuilt the kernel with DRI enabled for Savage, and rebooted, hoping all went well.

Unfortunately, KDE remained crashing my system. I could startx and run links -g perfectly, but anything gtk/kde based seemed to kill it. Set about googling for the problem but couldn’t find anything useful. Then an idea popped into my head. I would search freedesktop.org’s bugzilla. Searching for ‘savage’ enabled me to quickly find https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5878 which had diagnosed the problem as an incompatability between the kernel’s savagefb and X’s savage driver. Another kernel recompile, this time disabling savagefb finally. Reset, and this time X started perfectly, DRI and all.

Victory 😀

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