Xfce XFCE features not working

elgrande · Saturday at 7:40 PM

Hey there...

I am running xfce under xlibre (latest packages).
I have 2 problems so far:
1. I cannot change the desktop background. (minor issue)
2. The screen poweroff time in the power management settings is not considered. the screen stays on all the time. (really bugs me, I want the screen to turn of when I am e.g. waiting for some long running tasks)

Any ideas how I can debug those issues?

jwillia3 · Saturday at 7:58 PM

1. Does xsetroot -bitmap $YOURFILE work?
2. Is xfce4-power-manager running?

fahrenheit · Saturday at 9:05 PM

elgrande #1 happens for me when I don't have hardware accelaration (i.e. no radeon, amdgpu, i915kms or nvidia kmod and respective firmware, if needed, loaded).
#2 might also be related.

baaz · Saturday at 9:31 PM

Does xset q say DPMS is enabled?
xset(1) details how to configure DPMS to your preferences.

jwillia3 said:
xsetroot

* x11-toolkits/xwallpaper xwallpaper(1) is a bit more user friendly and supports more formats, I find it useful for debugging these issue along with xsetroot.

elgrande · Saturday at 9:54 PM

jwillia3 xfce4-power-manager is running.

fahrenheit oh that might be a point, I have no drm driver running (playing with claude code and drm breaks it for me which is strange).

baaz xwallpaper also fails silently at it's task.

elgrande · Saturday at 10:04 PM

P.S.: baaz xset q says:

Code:

DPMS (Display Power Management Signaling):
  Server does not have the DPMS Extension

baaz · Saturday at 11:13 PM

elgrande said:
P.S.: baaz xset q says:

Code:

DPMS (Display Power Management Signaling): Server does not have the DPMS Extension

So, you are on bare-bones SCFB? It doesn't support DPMS.
Try the *xf86-video-vesa driver it should support it, and it is not a DRM driver.

Regarding Xwallpaper, it has a --debug flag and a --no-randr flag, they might help.
Maybe XFCE started occluding the root window since the last time I was using it (Similar to GNOME & KDE) ... if that's the case these commands will run successfully but since DE's background window is on top of the root window you'll see no changes, and these tools will be of no use.

Its very peculiar for such an application to have a problem with DRM?! But considering what I've read on their code quality it isn't much of a surprise.

elgrande · Sunday at 12:06 AM

baaz said:
Its very peculiar for such an application to have a problem with DRM?! But considering what I've read on their code quality it isn't much of a surprise.

Well, the system froze completely and after reboot in /var/log/messagesthe drm driver complained about hanging. So I did not bother further and switched from Wayland to xlibre/xfce - and there it works.

elgrande · Sunday at 1:07 AM

baaz said:
So, you are on bare-bones SCFB? It doesn't support DPMS.
Try the *xf86-video-vesa driver it should support it, and it is not a DRM driver.

The vesa driver refuses to work. I always get "No screens found". It might make sense to say this is a pretty old laptop with "Nvidia Optimus" dual GPU, which always has been a hassle.

Espionage724 · Sunday at 1:26 AM

elgrande said:
Well, the system froze completely and after reboot in /var/log/messagesthe drm driver complained about hanging. So I did not bother further and switched from Wayland to xlibre/xfce - and there it works.

What FreeBSD version? On 16.0-CURRENT a few days ago all drm-kmod (61, 66, 612/latest) KP'd on load on Intel UHD 630 with Xorg/Xfce (never had that happen before but I guess par for latest

)

fahrenheit · Sunday at 1:32 AM

elgrande said:
The vesa driver refuses to work. I always get "No screens found". It might make sense to say this is a pretty old laptop with "Nvidia Optimus" dual GPU, which always has been a hassle.

If you use uefi, it's not the vesa driver you need it's the scfb driver. In any case, my suggestion is to build drm-612-kmod (if on 15.1/16, drm-66-kmod if on 15.0 or drm-61-kmod if on 14) and whatever gpu-firmware kmod you need (for amd or intel) from ports (search the forum, you will find several recent threads). In addition, you also need nvidia-drm and the nvidia-xyz-kmod built from ports (where xyz is the driver version that supports your hardware) if you want both cards to work.

When you solve that you will also solve your issue with wayland.

elgrande · Sunday at 10:42 AM

Espionage724 said:
What FreeBSD version? On 16.0-CURRENT a few days ago all drm-kmod (61, 66, 612/latest) KP'd on load on Intel UHD 630 with Xorg/Xfce (never had that happen before but I guess par for latest )

It is 15.1-RELEASE and I am already using graphics/drm-612-kmod without success. It loads fine but xlibre freezes on start.
CPU is i7-6820HK.

elgrande · Sunday at 10:48 AM

fahrenheit said:
If you use uefi, it's not the vesa driver you need it's the scfb driver. In any case, my suggestion is to build drm-612-kmod (if on 15.1/16, drm-66-kmod if on 15.0 or drm-61-kmod if on 14) and whatever gpu-firmware kmod you need (for amd or intel) from ports (search the forum, you will find several recent threads). In addition, you also need nvidia-drm and the nvidia-xyz-kmod built from ports (where xyz is the driver version that supports your hardware) if you want both cards to work.

When you solve that you will also solve your issue with wayland.

Yeah the scfb driver works but I have the problems with display power management and the wallpaper.
This laptop is 10 years old but I never managed to get the Nvidia graphics to work under FreeBSD - there is no switch in UEFI setup to only use the discrete GPU unfortunately.
I am fine with Intel graphics so, it is sufficient for my needs.
I will test again to verify misc/claude-code really is responsible for the crash and it is not a coincidence.

elgrande · Sunday at 11:48 AM

So Plasma Wayland crashed again while Claude Code was running. It has not crashed in months without Claude Code though. Very peculiar indeed.
For now I disabled animations by setting the animation speed to "immediately" since behavior pointed in the direction of the animations being responsible. So let's see if that helps.

Anyhow if there are ideas on how to debug the xlibre/xfce combination with the drm driver, I will be happy to debug.

baaz · Sunday at 11:53 AM

elgrande said:
The vesa driver refuses to work. I always get "No screens found". It might make sense to say this is a pretty old laptop with "Nvidia Optimus" dual GPU, which always has been a hassle.

VBE (VESA BIOS Extensions) 3 is available on basically everything from 2000s onward.
You might need to add a X server config snippet like this:

Code:

Section "Device"
    Identifier "MyCard"
    Driver "vesa"
EndSection

To your xorg.conf.d to force enable it, remember to remove it when you switch back to KMS drivers.

elgrande · Sunday at 11:58 AM

baaz said:
VBE (VESA BIOS Extensions) 3 is available on basically everything from 2000s onward.
You might need to add a X server config snippet like this:

Code:

Section "Device" Identifier "MyCard" Driver "vesa" EndSection

To your xorg.conf.d to force enable it, remember to remove it when you switch back to KMS drivers.

That xorg.conf.d snipped is exactly what I tried and it resulted in "No screens found".

baaz · Sunday at 12:32 PM

elgrande said:
xlibre freezes on start.

So with drm-612-kmod's i915kms + XLibre you get a startup freeze,
While Wayland works with the same DRM configuration, but cluade-code causes Wayland to crash,
SCFB + XLibre works, but there is no DPMS (Which is expected),
And you just use the Intel iGPU, the NVIDIA card/drivers is not involved.

Can you provide the DRM XLibre logs on the crash condition? kldstat, and pciconf output would also be nice to have.

+ Forcing the vesa driver (With a snippet similar to what I provided above) while having a KMS driver loaded leads to a total video freeze on X server's startup, so check your X configs too.

And isn't claude-code a TUI node.js program? Could it be your terminal emulator (perhaps a GPU accelerated one?) causing the crash?; I do not know much about what's going on in Wayland-land but a TUI program causing a DE crash is really weird.

On VESA:Some BIOSes still leave in the VBE callbacks in UEFI mode, looks like yours isn't one of them, if the BIOS has a option for "legacy boot" or something similar you might wanna try booting FBSD with that and then rerunning X with the vesa driver, but fixing X with DRM would be the preferable way.

elgrande · Sunday at 8:22 PM

baaz thank you for the offer to help. Anyhow when switching from Wayland/Plasma back to Xlibre/XFCE, all of a sudden, it started to work with i915kms. So, problem solved - changing background and power management now work.
One thing I noticed: installing xlibre did nor remove plasma anymore, so the xorg dependency seems to have been removed.

baaz · Monday at 11:10 AM

elgrande said:
baaz thank you for the offer to help. Anyhow when switching from Wayland/Plasma back to Xlibre/XFCE, all of a sudden, it started to work with i915kms. So, problem solved - changing background and power management now work.
One thing I noticed: installing xlibre did nor remove plasma anymore, so the xorg dependency seems to have been removed.

Welcome!
No, sadly this SINGLE line is still left in the port's Makefile for 7 months after we reported all this.
...
It is probably a case of a pkgng glitch letting those packages install, but at a later time forcing you to remove the conflicting ones, because based on the Makefile and my testing the conflict still persists.