Upgrading Xorg to 7.2 on FreeBSD 6.2.

I've just successfully followed the instructions in /usr/ports/UPDATING to upgrade my Xorg 6.9 installation to the new modular 7.2 on my main desktop machine (currently running 6.2-RELEASE-p5).

The build went exactly according to the instructions in UPDATING - it just took a looooong time. After the build however I had some problems running the merge script. It barfed on a number of files in /usr/X11R6/ (mostly to do with either gconf or xdm). I moved them to a safe location and re-ran the script which then completed successfully. One of the moved files was Xsetup_0, which removed my xdm configuration. Rather than try to recreate this, I switched to Slim - another login manager available in ports. Prettifies things up a bit, allowing me to run a rather nifty picture of Jupiter from the Nasa site at the login screen, together with anti-aliased fonts.

I also successfully ran the update on my Dell laptop. I initially couldn't get slim working here, it used the wrong resolution. This was because the slim rc script was running before the crontab entry which called 915resolution to hack the video BIOS to allow a resolution of 1280x800

Whilst I'm on the subject of FreeBSD, I've also managed to get HAL working under Xfce 4.4 and Thunar after ignoring it for a long time. Followed some instructions I find on the Thunar documentation pages. In simple terms you need:
dbus_enable="YES"
hald_enable="YES"
polkitd_enable="YES"
in rc.conf.
Make sure that Thunar was built with HAL support, and then:
cd /usr/ports/sysutils/thunar-volman && make install clean.

From Thunar you can then fiddle with the settings through Edit->Preferences.

So I now have Thunar auto-mounting my removable media on insertion. Now I need to look at what I can do with my ipod. Ideally I want it to automount and run gtkpod, then on closing gtkpod unmount and use camcontrol to eject it so that I get the "safe to disconnect" message. I think I may be able to do this with sudo and a little bit of scripting. I'll post back when I get it working.