Let's see, installing FreeBSD (I installed FreeBSD 11.3 on one of my machines yesterday; it has space for a few more partitions on drive ada0)
0) write the FreeBSD install image to a usb stick - I used one of my other FreeBSD workstations for this
1) boot the machine from the FreeBSD install usb stick, select "live" and read through the dmesg output just to be sure that all devices I care about are detected correctly (you know, network interfaces and stuff)
2) boot again (yes - I'm lazy) and run the installer - install FreeBSD
3) exit to shell and do any manual modifications if required (I give dhclient parameters so my machines get a semi-static ip address from my dhcp server, also I can set boot flags with gpart, if required)
4) boot into the new FreeBSD install, run
freebsd-update(8). Update to the latest patchlevel.
5) bootstrap
pkg(8) and install packages for drm. For me it means drm-kmod (the port is
graphics/drm-kmod). Configure the drm package by adding the correct kld_list= variable in
/etc/rc.conf. I'm not always sure what kind of Radeon graphics I have, so I just tried
kld_list="amdgpu" first, rebooted - the console didn't change and the I knew it was radonkms, so change to
kld_list="/boot/modules/radeonkms.ko", reboot - ok, we got it.
6) next, install Xorg packages you need; I like to test things with startx befoe installing a desktop environment, so I install xclock, xterm, twm, xrandr in addition to xorg-minimal.
7) configure Xorg by creating a file for your keyboard layout, mine is
/usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/keyboard-no.conf and the contents is
Code:
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "keyboard defaults"
MatchIsKeyboard "on"
Option "XkbLayout" "no"
EndSection
8) run
startx
as your user to test that Xorg works (I also like to run
xrandr
from a terminal window in Xorg, to verify that the resolution is correct
9) install your favorite desktop environment via pkg. Mine is xfce, so
# pkg install xfce
.
10) run
startxfce4
as your user and enjoy your new FreeBSD desktop.
(ok, you probably need to insstall a bunch of programs via pkg first)