Hey everyone, after searching online and piecing together clues I've managed to launch the graphical environment. After that the installation went flawlessly, and now I have a working system (which I've been using for the past 5 days). I'm coming back here with my solution, in hopes of helping someone else in the future.
I will reiterate the hardware I'm working with:
- ASUS S46CM laptop, from around 2013
- Intel HD Graphics 4000 integrated graphics (comes from Intel Ivy Bridge CPU)
- Nvidia GeForce GT 635M dedicated graphics
My goal is to use integrated graphics only. While some laptops have a BIOS option to disable dedicated graphics, mine does not, so the GhostBSD installer tries to load the Nvidia graphics driver that is too new (latest supported driver for my hardware is 391.35, the driver that gets loaded is 470). This eventually results in (EE) no screens found
, and I'm dropped to the command line.
First, run sudo kldload i915kms
to use the command line at full resolution (rather than have it stretched out). This will make reading the relevant logs (located at /var/log/Xorg.1.log
, can be browsed using less
) more convenient. In my case, the logs will show that "The NVIDIA GeForce GT 635M GPU installed in this system is supported through the NVIDIA 390.xx Legacy drivers." This will be helpful if you do decide to use the Nvidia graphics.
For the next step, internet access is required. (The FreeBSD Handbook's Network section helped me here in setting up a wireless connection.) Then run sudo pkg install xf86-video-intel
to install the required Intel graphics driver.
After installing, run sudo ee /etc/X11/xorg.conf
to edit the X11 configuration. Most relevant are the two sections in the file named Section "Device"
, which will look something like this:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "nvidia"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Card1"
Driver "nvidia"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection
Change the driver from "nvidia"
to "intel"
for the integrated graphics (PCI:0:2:0
in my case). This won't work if xf86-video-intel
hasn't been installed beforehand.
Finally, running startx
will bring up the graphical desktop environment as expected, and GhostBSD can be used and installed normally.
(Apologies for the absence of proper log files, I have not figured out how to offload them to a USB drive though the command line.)