Solved xfce4 black screen

[johnjohn]

i was using virtualbox for months to learn FreeBSD. now i have FreeBSD installed on my ASUS AMD laptop and it is working well. i installed drm-515-kmod and my graphics card is working. xorg works fine with twm. i want to install xfce4 and i install it on my laptop the same way that i do in virtualbox with FreeBSD 14.3. However, i get a black screen and i have to force the power off because i cannot access the tty from this point. What am i missing? how can it work in VirtualBox but not on my laptop? i just installed xf86-video-amdgpu and it makes no difference. I have to delete the .config/xfce4 directory for xfce4 to load. But if i logout and run startxfce4 again, then the black screen returns. Anyone have a solution?

 

[johnjohn]

update: today i reinstalled FreeBSD 14.3 and the drm-515-kmod no longer works on my system. I tried to make install from ports and it still doesn't work. I scratched my head, yelled a few obscenities and paused a few minutes until a lightbulb appeared (figuratively, of course). I installed drm-kmod and tried that instead ... voila! my graphics are working again. I thought that i would compile xfce4 from ports but after an hour building something called spidermonkey, i decided to control+c the process and install xfce4 from packages. I installed xfce4 from packages and tried it out ... it works! so far, i have no black screen. I am happy

side note: audio, usb mouse, sd card, usb sticks, ethernet and video are all working nicely! also, the sound coming out of my headphones is ridiculously nice! i can hear the strumming of the bass guitar. Amazing! i never got sound like this from Windows. However, the headphones are not automatically enabled when i plug them in, so i have some reading to do. Everything is working well for me now. woo-and-hoo!

topic closed/solved.

edit: my solution was to install drm-kmod instead of drm-515-kmod.