After making sure GDM would come up on startup by adding this to /etc/rc.conf…

dbus_enable="YES"
hald_enable="YES"
gnome_enable="YES"

(For some reason, lshal wouldn’t run if gnome_enable="YES" was the only line.)

…I was dismayed to discover that there were no users showing up in the GDM login form. Not even the “Other” option was available to let me log in manually.

Frustrated, I went to search Google. I started typing “freebsd gdm” and then Google Suggest popped up:

Looks like I’m not the only one Googling for that. Turns out I couldn’t find anything on Google — nobody seems to have been bothered to write anything up in an FAQ (which is why I’m writing this post).

On the offchance, I looked in /var/log/messages, and saw some messages quite like the following:

console-kit-daemon[60290]: WARNING: kvm_getenvv failed: cannot open /proc/60378/mem

Turns out FreeBSD doesn’t mount /proc by default, but it is required for GDM to work properly (and, I’d hazard a guess, OpenOffice.org and a whole lot of other stuff). You can easily enable procfs by adding this line to /etc/fstab:

proc /proc procfs rw 0 0

Then, reboot (or if you’re a clever clogs and mounted /proc by hand with mount, restart GDM /usr/local/etc/rc.d/gdm restart), and you should see the users in the login form!

Case in point:

The “no caching” bit is what it’s been running like for 8 months, using this config in /etc/collectd/collectd.conf:

<Plugin rrdtool>
        DataDir "/var/lib/collectd/rrd"
</Plugin>

To more than half my idle CPU usage, and get my load averages back down to near 0.00, all I had to do was add:

<Plugin rrdtool>
        DataDir "/var/lib/collectd/rrd"
       CacheTimeout 120
       CacheFlush 900
</Plugin>

I don’t get why they don’t ship it like that by default. Enable caching. Your server will thank you. Thanks to the folks on #slug who held my hand while fixing this.

One of the first things I did was attempt to install Linux on it. Ubuntu 8.04 was my first try, and I was annoyed to find that I couldn’t get a picture with Xorg on it — just a blank screen. I also tried Debian Etch, Debian Sid, and Fedora 8, which also had the exact same symptoms.

The only Linux distro that worked was openSUSE 11, but I couldn’t stand openSUSE because it was slow, YaST was painful to use, I hated RPM, and they customised GNOME way too much.

Initially, I thought it was a refresh rate problem. I have gathered that the optimum screen mode for the eMac is 1024×768 @ 89Hz. Because Ubuntu was trying to set the mode to 1280×800 @ 60Hz by default, I added a modeline for the proper mode. However, that didn’t fix my blank screen, and I almost gave up in despair.

I also ran xrandr under a tty, and it was interesting to see that it thought my Mac had DVI hardware — DVI-0 and DVI-1. The eMac most definitely does not support DVI, so this told me the issue was a little more advanced than refresh rates.

On Saturday, while talking to the friendly folks on #gentoo-powerpc, one of them pointed me to this page (Update: the link is an equivalent page, as the original link is now gone), which contained some ConnectorTable hacks. As it turned out, the hacks worked! Both internal and external VGA worked (internal VGA was called VGA-1, and external VGA was called VGA-0), which makes me really happy.

So, to get X.Org working on your eMac, make the following changes to xorg.conf.

First you need to define the Modeline for the video mode:

Section "Monitor"
  Identifier   "Configured Monitor"
  # 1024x768 @ 89.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 72.00 kHz; pclk: 99.07 MHz
  Modeline "1024x768"  99.07  1024 1088 1200 1376  768 769 772 809  +HSync +Vsync
EndSection

Then, tell it to use the video mode:

Section "Screen"
  Monitor    "Configured Monitor"
  # Fill in self-explanatory data here.
  SubSection "Display"
     Viewport   0 0
     Depth     24
     Modes   "1024x768"
  EndSubSection
EndSection

Fix the broken ConnectorTable:

Section "Device"
  # Fill in device information here.
  Option      "ConnectorTable" "100,1,0,1,108,2,0,1"
EndSection

After you do that, you should have a working X display. If you still get a blank screen, switch to a tty, run export DISPLAY=:0, run xrandr, and check to see that the eMac is using the correct resolution. Make sure DVI is not mentioned.

The photo by Oswald using -HSync +Vsync depicts the eMac with the picture off-centre. This is because -HSync +Vsync (the default) is wrong! Use +HSync +Vsync, and your picture will be in the centre of the screen.

Instead of the ConnectorTable hack above, one user from the Ubuntu forums points out that it is possible to get a picture by adding the following code to the Device section:

Section "Device"
  # Device information goes here.
  Option "monitor-DVI-0" "iMac"
EndSection

This is not as good a solution as setting ConnectorTable, as the external VGA monitor does not work with this set.

If you used this information to try and fix X on your eMac, please let me know in the comments so I know whether it was helpful or not! Thanks!

To fix this, simply load the vboxnetflt module:

# modprobe vboxnetflt

Then, try starting the VM again. If it works, you know that the problem is that the vboxnetflt module is not loading on startup.

If it didn’t work, make sure the module has been built. A little # /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup ought to do the trick.

On most Linux systems, you can add an entry to /etc/modprobe.conf to make the module load on startup. (On OpenRC-based Gentoo systems, you can add an entry to /etc/conf.d/modules to do it the Gentoo Way™.)

This post isn’t going to be a how-to; rather, I will just give you a quick overview of how I did it, and let you readers fill in the gaps.

Here are the tools I used:

• Linux distro of choice (I have used both Ubuntu and Gentoo to do this, but it doesn’t really matter)
• Windows XP CD or ISO image
• Service Pack 3 redistributable
• cabextract (available as a package in Ubuntu)
• file-roller (a.k.a. GNOME’s Archive Manager)
• Wine (at least version 1.0)
• genisoimage (with geteltorito)

What I did:

• Extracted the contents of a Windows XP ISO (in your case, it may be the CD) into a directory called “xp” on my Desktop. I initially loop-mounted the ISO and copied the files out of it that way, but I later had to re-extract them with file-roller instead. The reason? If you extract the contents of the ISO with lower-case names (the loop-mounted ISO lower-cased all the filenames), the CD will not boot. Make sure they are all in uppercase.
• Extracted Service Pack 3: mkdir ~/Desktop/sp3 && cd ~/Desktop/sp3 && cabextract ../xpsp3.exe
• Ran the slipstreamer for SP3 on the files: cd ~/sp3/update && wine update.exe /integrate:Z:\\home\\jeremy\\Desktop\\xp
• Extracted the boot image from the existing Windows XP ISO. (To do this, you can either use the geteltorito command, run BBIE under Wine, or follow the directions under the “Finding the CD boot image” heading on this guide.)
• Made the ISO image with genisoimage. You’ll at least need the -b (reference the boot image you extracted in the previous step), -no-emul-boot, -c, -max-iso9660-filenames, -relaxed-filenames options.

If you’re lucky, you now have a Windows XP SP3 ISO.