[SOLVED][Community XFCE] Unresponsive GUI

[digifuzzy]

I think I can effectively close this issue. I believe I have found the mode of failure and a couple of quirks along the way.

I was able to burn the GhostBSD XFCE iso to DVD and boot to bare hardware. There was some hiccups with the boot up. I had to modify my BIOS (still using AMD Bulldozer) to enable EFI to allow boot up. I didn't have this problem with the FreeBSD DVD on a previous occasion. I think the stipulation of forced EFI boot-up is a flaw that would prevent users who have older non-EFI hardware.

Compounding the problem was that both the GhostBSD Mate and XFCE DVD iso are missing the xf86-video-ati driver. Again, older hardware. Anyone who has a video card manufactured before Northern Islands(HD 6000) will encounter Xorg failing to start, must do a manual pkg install of the non-amdgpu driver, and then issue the startx command to get the desktop. I had not encountered this problem when I previously used the GhostBSD iso's.

Once I had the live DVD with desktop up and running, I could confirm the operation of XFCE screen blanking. As I suspected, the screen blanks and then upon activation (i.e. mouse movement) XFCE presents a lock screen asking for a password for login. This lock screen must be explicitly disabled to prevent it's usage. Under the menu->settings->screensaver dialog, simply disabling the lock screen entirely is ineffective. I think this is a bug with XFCE. IMO, disabling the lock screen should cause all lock screen usage to be disabled. I had to re-enable the lock screen then disable lock screen on wake from sleep (see attached image).

In updating the VirtualBox packaging for FreeBSD, problems arose with video drivers. There are all manner of forum posts about VBox not working under certain conditions. Buried in a FreeBSD wiki page is an annotation that VBoxSVGA video driver is to be utilized for FreeBSD VBox guest.

Unfortunately, the VBox GUI has a quirk when setting the video driver. Your choices for drivers are VBoxVGA, VMSVGA, and VBoxSVGA. However, selecting anything other than VMSVGA will cause the VBox GUI to issue the warning "invalid" settings. This can be safely ignored for video settings. What complicates matters is that the VBox GUI will override the user selection if the user selects the "Enable 3D Acceleration". When the Guest settings dialog is closed, VBox GUI will set the video driver to VMSVGA regardless of user selection. This is what caused problems for me here.

So, the tl;dr version is that I think lock screen usage needs to be disabled in multiple setting values. It's sad that some older video drivers may not be included into the DVD (e.g. xf86-video-ati). For virtual usage, users have to be vigilant about settings and what Oracle does behind the scenes in the GUI.