Newbie need help on configuring mouse and X windows

[Lei Luo]

Hi, everyone,

I am new to FreeBSD and just trying to learning something. I installed FreeBSD without X system on my computer and it works fine. But when I tried to configure mouse and X windows, I had big problem.

As instructed in the handbook, I configured the type and port of the mouse (PS2, so I used the default). But after I enabled it, I would be in one of two situations. 

In the first situation, the background of the screen turns to blue and I cannot see if the mouse cursor moving. I could not see the dialog any more. Sometimes, if I just pressed enter, I could go back the previous screen, but having a blue background now. More commonly, the system was just stuck there and the keyboard was locked. At this time, I had to turn off the power to shutdown the computer.

In the second situation, the background was OK. But the mouse cursor was twinkling on the screen. In addition, the mouse cursor had a strange shape, not rectangular, but just like some unprintable character displayed on a DOS screen. Does anyone know what is wrong here and how to fix the problem?

If I skipped this step and tried to configure X windows directly, of course, the system warned me that I hadn't configured the mouse and asked me to go back to configure it.

My computer is a Gateway 2000 desktop with 200 Intel Pentium II processor. Very old so I used to run Linux on it.

Thank you!

P.S., I didn't see the kernel configuration menu. Is it removed from FreeBSD 5.x? Also, when I tried to reboot or shutdown the computer with "reboot" or "shutdown" commands, my computer was stuck instead of reboot or shutdown. At that time, the power button on the computer could not work. I had to turn off the power switch on the wall. Does anyone have this problem, too?