Solved FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-amd64-KDE-Plasma (2021-05-22)

Cath O'Deray

Cath O'Deray

 
Spun off from <https://forums.FreeBSD.org/threads/freebsd-kommunity-edition.78594/post-513391>, thanks in particular to:
General comments and questions

hald_enable="YES"
  • can be removed from /etc/rc.conf
– HAL is retired.

I'm curious about the 311 M given to the EFI system partition, compared to:
  • mine (200 M, which might have been a default for an installation of -CURRENT in late 2019)
  • the FreeBSD-provided image for 13.0-RELEASE (33 M).
FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-amd64-KDE-Plasma.vdi (converted from FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-amd64-KDE-Plasma.img) in VirtualBox 6.1.22:

1621670652542.png


FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-amd64.vhd from <https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/VM-IMAGES/13.0-RELEASE/amd64/Latest/>:
1621671127537.png

I'd give much more than 2 G to freebsd-swap. This is contentious so ▶ over to Swap battle stories for discussion.

For consistency: consider having freebsd-boot, efi and freebsd-swap at partitions 1, 2 and 3.

Last but not least: for various reasons, I'd like to see ZFS instead of UFS.

Thanks again to Samuel Venable!
 
grahamperrin said:
Spun off from <https://forums.FreeBSD.org/threads/freebsd-kommunity-edition.78594/post-513391>, thanks in particular to:
General comments and questions

hald_enable="YES"
  • can be removed from /etc/rc.conf
– HAL is retired.

I'm curious about the 311 M given to the EFI system partition, compared to:
  • mine (200 M, which might have been a default for an installation of -CURRENT in late 2019)
  • the FreeBSD-provided image for 13.0-RELEASE (33 M).
FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-amd64-KDE-Plasma.vdi (converted from FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-amd64-KDE-Plasma.img) in VirtualBox 6.1.22:

View attachment 9929

FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-amd64.vhd from <https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/VM-IMAGES/13.0-RELEASE/amd64/Latest/>:
View attachment 9930
I'd give much more than 2 G to freebsd-swap. This is contentious so ▶ over to Swap battle stories for discussion.

For consistency: consider having freebsd-boot, efi and freebsd-swap at partitions 1, 2 and 3.

Last but not least: for various reasons, I'd like to see ZFS instead of UFS.

Thanks again to Samuel Venable!
Click to expand...
Were you able to figure out why sddm and thus a KDE session wasn't starting? If you haven't, I'd like to help debug this. I forgot to mention the non-root username is just "freebsd".

Additionally, I just have more experience using ufs from just the order at which I tried things when trying out FreeBSD for the first time. I remember reading here you can't just simply dd a zfs like you can a ufs, so I'll be looking into the addtional steps involved. On top of needing more swap space, which means I'm going to have to redo this from scratch. It's no biggie, since I like getting practice with this.

I'll be making note of all these critiques before publishing the next version. Thank you for your feedback and trying it out! :D
 
Samuel Venable said:
… why sddm and thus a KDE session wasn't starting? …
Click to expand...

If I recall correctly:
  • whenever SDDM ran (without crashing) there was nothing more than a black screen
  • I chose to stop or disable the service, to avoid the possibility of things freezing
  • switching from quarterly to latest (then upgrading packages) leads to SDDM and Plasma working normally.
That's not a suitable explanation :-/ so I have VirtualBox snapshots, which I can restore, if required, for diagnosis (but not today – I'll be out of town).

Seamless mode, following an upgrade with latest:

1621766135838.png
 
lol I had no idea seamless mode was a thing in virtual box! I was considering to buy Paralells on MacOS for this very reason. Thanks for that, in addition to everything else!
 
grahamperrin said:
… (after the Plasma splash screen, blackness). Weird.
Click to expand...

Random feedback. I restored from a snapshot that was associated with those symptoms, encountered a kernel panic (expected; not an issue with the distribution), updated things, got beyond the splash screen to a normal deskop ☑

1624560795075.png


I say random because there's an occasional sense of randomness in and around this topic:

forums.freebsd.org

vbox - VirtualBox guests: black screen with X pointer; non-appearance of the desktop environment; non-starts of the DE (reappearance of SDDM)

Spun off from posts by other users under (after the original issue was solved). Host: % date ; uptime ; uname -v Sat 12 Jun 2021 14:47:02 BST 2:47p.m. up 3:34, 6 users, load averages: 1.56, 1.33, 1.41 FreeBSD 14.0-CURRENT #98 main-n247326-2349cda44fe: Sat Jun 12 08:19:48 BST 2021...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org
 
I updated the image to a vdi virtual box image by default:

FreeBSD - Google Drive

drive.google.com drive.google.com

Be aware I still have quite a bit of reading up to do on how to manage this with a working zfs so all we have short of your critiques is a ufs for now. But the rest you mentioned is up and running as you wanted afaik.

You will need to enable EFI boot in your virtual machine, the rest should work from there.

I'm not sure why, but this time around I somehow managed to break what initially was perfectly working wifi. After putting my ssid and psk in wpa_supplicant.conf and and setting up my rc.conf accordingly, there seems to be absolutely nothing I can do to get it working with my wireless network adapter anymore.

I'm hoping this is just my firewall blocking it and perfectly normal behavior and is easily correctable for anyone who knows what they are doing here better than I do. Also for some odd reason shutting down the virtual machine does not work the normal way. Shutting down by the guest OS interface or by the host OS Virtual Box menu, it will stall indefinitely without ever shutting down, thus forcing you to power off by closing the VM without sending a shutdown signal. These two issues I'm sure are correctable but I don't have all the time in the world to be concerned with it.
 
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