Gnome does not startup

Hi People,

FreeBSD newbie here.

I don't know if this is the correct place to post my question. So please feel free to point me in the right direction.

I have been trying to setup a Gnome FreeBSD workstation on my new machine, and I am puzzled I can't make it work.

I have tried multiple approaches, and nothing seems to work.

I am using FreeBSD 13-current (that is why I mentioned you could point me in the right direction as it might be a bug by running current). Mainly because my video is only supported by the latest drm-[devel|current]-kmod. On FreeBSD12 Gnome works but have no video card support </3 so is painfully slow.

Either way, the same installation can successfully run KDE, XFCE and MATE desktops, that is why I suspect it might be a bug on the Gnome port somewhere.

This is what it is happening with Gnome:

- I install it (I have tried binaries and compiling it from the ports collection still same result). All is setup, dbus, hald and all that jazz.
- When I try with gdm3, Xorg starts fine and then gdm loads the grey background and gets stuck in there, mouse can move but the UI is unresponsive. When this happens the machine is sitting idle, no cores pegged or anything outside the ordinary.
- The weirdest thing is that if I go to another virtual terminal and then come back to the terminal 9 where the GUI is, gdm seems to make progress, if I keep doing that I see some progress.
- When I try with another login manager (I have tried sddm and lightdm)) they load fine and I can try to startup a Gnome session, as soon as gnome loads is the same behavior I just described, is just in the gnome shell. I switch between vts and it seems to do some progress, but remains unresponsible.

My machine is:

Motherboard: Gigabyte Designare TRX40
Cpu: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970x
Video Card: AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT (from XFX)
Memory: 64 DDR4.

Has anyone seen something similar?

Thanks,
Jose
 
I am using FreeBSD 13-current (that is why I mentioned you could point me in the right direction as it might be a bug by running current). Mainly because my video is only supported by the latest drm-[devel|current]-kmod.
I'll let this one slide but you should know -CURRENT is an unsupported development version.

Either way, the same installation can successfully run KDE, XFCE and MATE desktops, that is why I suspect it might be a bug on the Gnome port somewhere.
All versions of FreeBSD use the same ports tree. It's one ports tree to rule them all. What this means is that all versions of FreeBSD have the same applications with the same versions available to them.

Diagnose your issue step by step. Test a plain Xorg first, using startx. Make sure that works correctly and the correct drivers are loaded (check /var/log/Xorg.0.log). If that works as it should, then you can enable one of the desktop environments (set in ~/.xinitrc) and test that. Don't enable GDM or SDDM until you are satisfied things work correctly with startx.
 
Back
Top