I was having some problems compiling gtk20 on a FreeBSD 4 box at work today. Having finally sorted it, this note is for Google to find so the next person doesn't have to debug it all over again.

The problem was the configure script failing to detect pango. There was a misleading error message gnome-config not found, which had me chasing three year old Google hits for an hour, until figuring out that gnome-config is only for Gnome version 1. pkg-config falls back to it to keep compatibility.

The library it fails to find is in fact libpangocairo — specifically, this library didn't get built, and so there is no pangocairo.pc for pkg-config to find. cairo was built, so pango must have missed it. It turned out that the test for cairo had failed, because cairo needs threads, but cairo.pc doesn't list libc_r (FreeBSD 4's threading library) as a dependency (probably because I am the only person daft enough to compile something as modern as cairo on such an old system).

So, recompile cairo; interrupt the build and edit cairo.pc, adding -lc_r to the libs; finish the compile, make deinstall reinstall, and rebuild from pango onwards. Solved.

This quick hack makes the consolehm utility for FreeBSD return the right CPU & motherboard temperature for motherboards with the it87 i2c chip. I just nicked the register offsets from the it87.c driver for Linux. (Needed it to verify the CPU power saving was working under FreeBSD.)

As I am having to use FreeBSD a lot at work now, I thought I would switch my home machine to it as well. I have used FreeBSD before, but I find it rather easier to use now I have found a bit more about it. The portinstall framework is less complete and nothing like as slick compared to Debian's package management, but it does reliably build stuff from source. And I rather like the idea of pulling the sources from the main distribution site, instead of getting the sanitised versions that Debian provide.

There were a few minor glitches. I have an SIS 7018 on-board sound chip, which did not work out of the box. But adding snd_t4dwave_load="YES" to loader.conf got it working (it's a cheap copy of the trident chip). And I am rusty at configuring XFree (well, x.org in this case) the old fashioned way — Debian's debconf interface to the X config is much nicer.

Of course, the best part of FreeBSD is the use of CVSup for updating. That is one fine program: like rsync it gives the impression of a very efficient and optimised transfer protocol.