Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 17:51:35 -0600 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: "Gary Frerking (TurboPower)" <garyf@turbopower.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: non-X install? Message-ID: <15022.45703.373892.951808@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <54956744@toto.iv>
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Gary Frerking (TurboPower) <garyf@turbopower.com> types: > Checked the docs, checked the FAQs. If this is covered, I missed it. > The FreeBSD install (and package system) seems to be geared towards > installing X (or having X installed) -- is there a way around this? Yes. For install, all you have to do is select a custom install, and then use one of the option that doesn't include X. I've never had a problem doing that. The packages assume you have a typical desktop system, which includes X for those things that can. If you're not typical, you need to rebuild from source. Fortunately, that's easy. The only real pain is that the tarballs are no longer on the CDROMs. > A couple examples: installing, then subsequently running cvsup or the full > vim package on a non-X machine gives me an error like 'Shared object > "libXaw.so.6" not found'. Um - where did you get your cvsup binary? Mine is statically linked, and works fine on my machines sans X. Vim is a port, and both vim5 and vim6 can be built without X support. The two are different, though. Ugly stuff, but it can be done. > I've done some Google searching on this, and see various answers like "you > have to have X installed to run that" or "recompile with the X support > turned off". So I understand the problem (I think) -- but I'd like to know > if there's a better way to avoid the problem in the first place? Unfortunately, no. I just dropped a note to the ports list asking if anyone has considered it. There's a a variable in /etc/make.conf to set which version of X you have; it'd be nice if you could set it to "NO", or some equivalent. MOTIF has that kind of support. The same question applies equally well to the various embeddable languages, as the ports that have them as options all seem to do them a different way. > Do most people install X? I would guess a reasonable number of people don't. I'd say not. X is provides a desktop, so there's no reason to install it on a server (except for having IT staff that are so windows-oriented they can't fathom dealing with a machine with no monitor). > I've been using Linux for a few years now and don't recall running into > anything similar under similar circumstances -- I use binary RPMs to install > and update things, and the apps that optionally use X just seem to deal with > it if no X is installed (or maybe the system deals with it, or maybe RPM > doesn't install X dependant things, I dunno -- it just works). I couldn't convince mandrake that I didn't want to configure an X server, and had to abort out of the install. I'd call that worse. I do remember not having any problems with X dependencies in RPM's afterwards. On the other hand, the problems I did have were, uh, well, I don't use Linux. > I'm actually pretty happy with FreeBSD overall, and I plan to buy 4.3 when > it becomes available -- but I'd sure appreciate it if you showed me the > trick to avoiding problems like this while using packages in a non-X world > (or consider making changes if necessary in the future). Unfortunately, the packages will probably not work outside of X. On the other hand, how many are there that have both X and non-X version? <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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