Please see the NetBSD Guide's chapter on X for more information about X. For XFree 3.x (as shipped with NetBSD 1.l5), add XkbOptions "ctrl:nocaps" if you want the caps-lock key become a second control-key. If you want to use the "Windows" keys on your keyboard, you can get some useful keysyms for them by using XkbModel "pc105" instead. XFree 4.x uses a different config file format. For it, put Option "XkbOptions" "ctrl:nocaps" into the "InputDevice" section of your XF86Config file. If &man.xdm.1; is enabled but you are unable to login for some reason, possibly because there is no root password, and you do not have virtual consoles enabled (or they are not yet supported on your port), you can either press ^C at the immediately after the boot messages indicate xdm is starting, or: Boot to single user mode - Usually this is accomplished by passing '-s' at the end of the boot command. Start the shell - Press ENTER when prompted for the shell. Check and mount the disks using &man.fsck.8; and &man.mount.8; - fsck -p ; mount -vat ffs Set term terminal type - TERM=vt100 ; export TERM Note: you may need to use a different terminal type such as 'pc3' or 'sun'. Fix problem - Edit /etc/rc.conf to disable xdm, run &man.passwd.1; to set root's password, or take whatever other corrective action is needed You need to add the location of the X binaries to your shell's path variable. For &man.csh.1; and its derivatives, add /usr/X11R6/bin to the line in your .cshrc file which sets the path variable. For sh and its derivatives, you'll need to modify you .profile instead. You need /usr/X11R6/bin in your path. As root add 'set path = ( $path /usr/X11R6/bin )' to /etc/csh.cshrc, and start a new shell. To see the error messages in this case, run: If your shell is &man.csh.1; or shells/tcsh: startx >& ~/x.log If your shell is &man.sh.1;, &man.ksh.1;, or similar: startx > ~/x.log 2>&1 Then view ~/x.log The system is outputting a line to the console indicating something has happened (such as 'su'). You should really run &man.xconsole.1; or one 'xterm -C' to capture this console output. You may need to ensure your kernel is compiled with the following enabled: options UCONSOLE # allow anyone to steal the virtual console See How to build a kernel for details on how to build your own kernels. If you're logged in as root, and get annoying portmap notices, you may wish to look at the FAQ entry on how to turn those messages off. To quickly tell which version of the X server you are running, you can use &man.xdpyinfo.1;. E.g.: $ xdpyinfo | grep release vendor release number: 335 In the case of XFree86, this tells us that the server version is 3.3.5. The paths below should be adjusted appropriately if using pkgtools/xpkgwedge. Install the fonts/ms-ttf package from pkgsrc. If you use the pkgsrc version of X, install also the fonts/mkfontscale and fonts/fontconfig packages. If using the XFree86 shipped with &os;, you may consider using fonts/fontconfig from pkgsrc as it offers more tweaking options. Set the variable PREFER.fontconfig to pkgsrc in the /etc/mk.conf file to ensure that the pkgsrc version is used in favour of the shipped (or native) version: PREFER.fontconfig=pkgsrc You may also want to instruct fontconfig to never use bitmap fonts again: # cd /usr/pkg/etc/fontconfig/conf.d # ln -s ../../../share/examples/fontconfig/conf.avail/70-no-bitmaps.conf . You may wish to replace the native fontconfig libraries entirely, which is useful should you have any previously-compiled binaries that used it. # cd /usr/X11R6/lib # mv libfontconfig.so.1.0 libfontconfig.so.1.0.old # rm libfontconfig.so.1 # ln -s ../../pkg/lib/libfontconfig.so.1 . # cd /usr/X11R6/bin # mv fc-cache fc-cache.old # mv fc-list fc-list.old To configure fontconfig, add the following line to your local.conf. This file is generally found in /etc/fonts/local.conf. If you installed the fonts/fontconfig package, you will also need to add the line to /usr/pkg/etc/fonts/local.conf (or replace one with a symbolic link to another): <dir>/usr/pkg/lib/X11/fonts/TTF</dir> The local.conf file may look like this: <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd"> <fontconfig> <dir>/usr/pkg/lib/X11/fonts/TTF</dir> </fontconfig> You can also add other directories containing fonts to the local.conf file. The following lines are for using teTeX-3.0 and ghostscript fonts: <dir>/usr/pkg/share/texmf-dist/fonts/</dir> <dir>/usr/pkg/share/ghostscript/fonts</dir> Rebuild the font cache for applications that use fontconfig # fc-cache -v Depending on your hardware this may take a long time. Run the following commands: # mkfontscale /usr/pkg/lib/X11/fonts/TTF # mkfontdir /usr/pkg/lib/X11/fonts/TTF There should now be the files fonts.dir and fonts.scale in the TTF font directory. Configure the X server: In the Module section, make sure that the following exists: Load "type1" Load "freetype" In the Files section, verify the order of the font paths. Verify that the TTF and Type1 font paths are before the rest: FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/local/" FontPath "/usr/pkg/lib/X11/fonts/TTF" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/:unscaled" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/:unscaled" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/" To apply the changes to the current X session, instead of restarting X, run the following command # xset fp rehash This will examine newly added font paths for changes. Instead of adding FontPath directives to the X configuration file, you can run the following commands from ~/.xinitrc (or ~/.xsession) file: xset +fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1 xset +fp /usr/pkg/lib/X11/fonts/TTF xset +fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/local That's it! Run the following commands to test the configuration. $ xterm -ls -fg gray -bg black -ls -fa 'Courier New:bold' -fs 10 Run the command fc-list it should list the fonts available, and shouldn't dump core! While the xterm command from above only tests the fontconfig part, the following command will test the XLFD-style access: $ xterm -fn '-monotype-Courier New-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-m-0-iso8859-1' Another test is that the following should show multiple fonts: $ xlsfonts | grep -i 'courier new' You can find other TTF font packages under pkgsrc/fonts. For example fonts/vera-ttf It is possible that the application in question is computing the font information that should have been prepared by fc-cache - re-run 'fc-cache -v' to make sure the information in the cache is up-to-date. No fonts found; this probably means that the fontconfig library is not correctly configured. You may need to edit the fonts.conf configuration file. More information about fontconfig can be found in the &man.fontconfig.3; manual page and on You haven't run 'fc-cache -v' like the fonts/fontconfig MESSAGE suggests during installation. For details, see 'pkg_info -D fontconfig' and above. First thing to do is to install the window manager you prefer. You can find a lot of them, ready to install, in pkgsrc's wm category. After a successful installation, figure out how is the binary named. It will usually match package's name. Once you know how to execute the window manager, you have to configure your X session to start it up. We will be using twm in our examples (which comes with X), whose binary is named twm: If you are using &man.startx.1;, edit the ~/.xinitrc file and append the following line to it: exec twm If you are using &man.xdm.1;, edit the ~/.xsession file and append the following line to it: exec twm You can see that the content for each file is the same, so you may want to create a link between them. Xm does not come with the standard X11 environment. It is part of Motif, which is a commercial graphical user interface. A freeware implementation of Motif called Lesstif is also available. It is available as part of the NetBSD packages collection, under x11/lesstif. xpm.h is part of the X PixMap library, used by many programs to allow more multi (than two) colour icons. It is available as part of the NetBSD packages collection, under graphics/xpm If it is a third party item of software, you should check if a version is available via the NetBSD packages collection. If you are writing you own code you need to ensure you link against the necessary X libraries. In this case, add -L/usr/X11R6 -lX11 to the end of your link line.