Into.the.Void.

Today xorg 7.0 became stable in Gentoo, so I decided to upgrade to it.
Maybe it was my fault but I thought I did not need to do anything specific apart from removing the old blocking xorg and installing the new one…WRONG! DON’T DO IT!!.
You NEED to read this: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Modular_Xorg and this: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/desktop/x/x11/modular-x-howto.xml before proceeding.
Else you’ll end up like me with a LOT of unwanted packages/drivers that the new xorg brings. I only took notice of that halfway through, when the portage was trying to install the wacom tablet driver ?!?!?!
Then I had to remove all the previous packages that the latest emerge process had installed on my system. Luckilly I had made a script about a month ago that reports the last emerged packages and lets you remove them. So with one command I was back to the beggining where I had just unmerged xorg 6.8.
Then it was time to do it the right way like the HOWTOs say. It’s the first time that a stable package in Gentoo required from me to do specific stuff before starting. IMHO the gentoo devs missed a spot here. Since this was supposed to be a simple upgrade of a stable package, if there was the need of making changes to config files before starting, there should have been a HUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE banner before pressing anything to get the process started. Oh and btw, emerge -uDavt world won’t get you very long in the upgrade process. There are at least 2-3 packages that must be installed before others if you do a world update. So STICK to the HOWTO and do a emerge -DuNv xorg-x11 …

So you think that everything will now work smoothly ? NOT!
1) First thing I noticed was that I had to manually make a couple of changes inside xorg.conf. Specifically change the old RgbPath and ModulePath to these 2 lines below:

RgbPath "/usr/share/X11/rgb"
ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"


2) Install a newer ati driver. 8.26.18 works fine for me until now and does not have the black screen problem after Xorg logoff, which many older drivers used to.

3) For an unknown reason my .Xmodmap stopped from being read. I now moved all the previous commands I had inside there to .xinitrc.

xmodmap /home/foo/.Xmodmap


4) Some of my fonts were missing or did not display properly. Rox-filer could not read greek chars and I could not write greek to the console any more. I had to read these 2 great documents to fix them: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Xorg_and_Fonts , http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=23575 .

5) Some minor problems I faced during the “recovery from xorg 7 upgrade process” were due to either my config files being a bit messed up after using Gentoo as a desktop for almost 2 years now (and doing an awfull great number of things without getting advice from the proper guides), or from my rush to finish as fast as possible that lead me into doing even more stupid stuff than Gentoo had.

Gentoo moto: You CAN’T get bored!

Filed by kargig at 22:38 under Linux
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