Question about getting a GUI going

B

BeastlyPenguin

I am a complete noob so I apologize if this is a stupid simple question but I am installing freeBSD for the first time and added my user to the video group and got x installed and started X and I have this GUI going but I am trying to install Xfce and my problem is that I don't see how to scroll down on this to see what all it is trying to tell me. (I see I have already made a mistake by running Desktops installer as su instead of direct root login)

Again I am very sorry if this is a stupidly simple question I am pretty much coming at this from no CLI experience at all

It won't let me post the IMG directly I will check rules and see if I can put a link to imgur or something similar but its the standard X startup has like blue teal top bars on the windows

Edit: Hey guys I was able to figure it out thank you so much for all your guidance and support. My mistake was trying to start X without having ran desktop-installer first so it started up the weird blue outline version of X and I didn't know how to navigate it
 
Need more info. Assuming you installed 15.0-RELEASE? Are you following the Handbook? What GUI are you talking about?
What have you actually done? Show us the text. Preferably not images if possible.
 
A *guess* (as drhowarddrfine said, not enough inforamation--which happens, when you're new, you aren't sure what's important). See if whatever is giving you that cut off information either has a square button to push, or if you can drag the edges--in either case, it may widen the window so you can see information. Otherwise, see if you can exit X and run your command from the console (with no X). The su, vs actual root login shouldn't matter. There are even other ways, sudo, doas, and more.

Anyway, if you can stretch that window, cool. If not, follow drhowarddrfine's suggestions and show us the text if possible.
 
Hello,

This might be too late since you already have a GUI up and running.

If you just wanted a quick GUI right after the initial freebsd text based installer is finished then you could have tried this (as root):

pkg update && pkg upgrade
pkg install xorg drm-kmod mate mate-terminal lightdm lightdm-gtk-greeter
sysrc dbus_enable="YES"
sysrc lightdm_enable="YES"


The above should be enough since xorg is supposed to autodetect what graphics driver to use so here you could try and reboot or type startx.

I have had one issue if I reboot at this stage and the symptom was that the GUI login got stuck in a loop. The reason for this is that this particular GUI is sensitive for using the correct graphics driver and sometimes xorgs autodetect fails.

To fix this hit ctrl-alt-F1 to get a login prompt and login as root. Add a file called 20.conf in the directory /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d with the following content:

Section "Device"
Identifier "ident"
Driver "scfb"
EndSection

Since I am lazy I don't use a text editor or do cd to the directory where the above file needs to be put, I just use the cat command from shell to create the file like this:

cat <<EOF>> /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20.conf
Section "Device"
Identifier "ident"
Driver "scfb"
EndSection
EOF

Once you type the first line and hit enter there will be a ">" prompt. Just continue typing and when you finally type "EOF" and hit enter the cat command will stop and the file will be there.

What this file does is that it tells xorg to use the scfb driver which is a software driver so you will want to change this to the driver that matches your graphics card.

There is some more information in post #6 and #7 in this thread.

/grandpa
 
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