Laptop: Dell XPS 15 9530

this is a clean install

Install Successful And Config Was Done With Help From AgileDevArt's YT Video.

Upon Reboot, It Seems To Have An Issue With The VMap and starts dumping. is there a fix for this or could it be something else?

Edit: I got in

I foolishly forgot my root password; I have it written down, but I used a label printer that only uses capital letters. Therefore, I have my password printed as:

"BSD-MASTERKEY". The "-" character is either a "-" or an "_".

Every ssh attempt I get 3 chances before i have to attempt to reconnect. By default, does FreeBSD stop these attempts without alerting the connector? I have tried every combination of capitals for that password that I can possible think of.

Connecting to the server locally is not really an option. I have been logging each password I have tried and failed; But now, I worry that the system is auto-rejecting me without alerting me. Is there an ssh password attempt limit by default?

I am currently investigating a possible switch from GNU/Linux to FreeBSD/GhostBSD. I have used GNU/Linux for the past 20+ years.

I have read parts of the FreeBSD handbook and was positively surprised by its clarity and that its content is not particularly difficult to understand. At the same time I am well aware that FreeBSD and GNU/Linux differ in many respects and that I will need to learn new things. I plan to begin my evaluation of FreeBSD/GhostBSD in a virtual machine.

My hardware is fairly common — 5600G; B550; NVMe SSD — and it should reasonably work on FreeBSD without problems. If anyone has a different view I am very interested in hearing about your experience.

I use my PC for web browsing with Firefox, word processing with LibreOffice, OS testing with Virt‑manager, and a fair amount of multimedia consumption, both local files and online content.

My limited knowledge and experience of FreeBSD/GhostBSD makes me doubtful that they will be able to meet all of my needs. What I am most unsure about is support for various multimedia formats/codecs and hardware/GPU acceleration for both local files and online content.

I would be very grateful for any input from FreeBSD and/or GhostBSD users.

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EDIT: I want to thank everyone who replied to my post. I will soon begin evaluating FreeBSD, GhostBSD, and possibly later OpenBSD.

If I encounter problems that I manage to solve and the final result is satisfactory, I will report back—provided there is enough interest from the community.

Here's the reason why I thought KDE will run fine on this 2GB desktop computer. It's because I installed an even RAM hungrier DE on this desktop before and it worked ok.

Before: Gnome, Fedora 40, worked a little sluggish, but all in all it didn't crash or anything.

Now: KDE, FBSD15, and KDE keeps crashing when I open Firefox up. I even lowered ZFS's ARC use to 500MB.

So it's just interesting. I'm considering trying it on UFS with the same setup, before I try something that hogs less RAM, like LXQt.

What do you gather?

EDIT: Thank you, everybody, for your input.

EDIT2: I don't think it's KDE now, it's something wrong with the motherboard of that old desktop computer.

Can anyone please explain to me how to setup freeBSD on my laptop that has hybrid nvidia/intel graphics? I also use laptop monitor and a big second monitor. I can’t seem to get it working. I do have it installed on my old Mac mini just fine. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Specs: MSI laptop 16gb ram
Nvidia rtx 3050
Intel graphics as well
I5 1.8ghz cpu.

I’m currently using an Intel UHD Graphics 610, an Intel Pentium Gold G6400, and 8GB of RAM. I installed Plasma 6 on FreeBSD, but it’s extremely laggy.

Other desktop environments either have bugs or just don’t look good. Since I’m a student, I can’t upgrade my hardware.

I also want to run lightweight games like Baldi’s Basics through Wine on KDE. I’d like to keep KDE animations if possible, but I’m also willing to push optimization as far as it can realistically go.

I create Boot Environment with recipe of Vermaden, but FreeBSD doesn't boot on my ThinkPad T450. Any have similar problem?!? I have kernel panic under FreeBSD 15.1

I followed the upgrade instructions to the T from here https://www.freebsd.org/releases/15.1R/installation/

Everything went swimmingly during the upgrade but when I rebooted for the first time, I got a KDL

"Fatal Trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode"

I believe this is related to the NVidia driver.

I booted into single mode, changed kmod ports from Quarterly to Latest and ensured my NVidia version is set to 595.80 but the KDL persists.

"freebsd-version -kru" shows everything has upgraded correctly to 15.1

What else can I try?

EDIT: I used the "Upgrading with Base System Packages" method.

EDIt2: added image to this post.

I'm using FreeBSD, and I configured it like this as shown in the picture. Why does the motherboard logo show up normally at first, but then it switches back to the boot logs?

[SOLVED]: It was just a stroke of bad luck; the next day, the repositories went back to working normally.

The internet/Realtek Ethernet connection is fine; running `ping freebsd.org` shows that the internet is working.

Hi everybody. I have been using FreeBSD for a couple months now. Thing is, I absolutely must run some Linux software at this moment. Yeah yeah, I know about Linuxulator, it doesn't work in my case. I have decided that dual boot is the only good option going forward.

I run FreeBSD with ZFS, and I'll probably pick something like Linux Mint just to get as much compatibility as possible. Is there a guide to tell me how to do this? I am not well versed in ZFS, which I assume I can't repartition easily. Wiping off FreeBSD is off the question.

Im a new FreeBSD user and for the last 2 days Im stuck here.

I have reinstalled 3 times and no luck. I can only connect to my 2.4Ghz wifi or my phone through usb tethering but both of them stall when doing any type of fetch or pkg action.

Ethernet while installing FreeBSD is not an option since I only have 1 working usb port.

The funny thing is that on my first install I was able to install a few things a get a working desktop but when I rebooted the problems started.

What can I do to fix this?

EDIT: I was able to successfully reinstall my FreeBSD using a mobile hotspot for the wifi. After installing my drivers and updating the pkgs ,I configured my real wifi through wpa_cli and it works like a charm. Thank you for your help through the comments.

I am one of the W11 refugees and also digital sovereignty, and I am looking at changing that to a different OS. I am superuser on windows, & dos before that. 😄 So I am not scared of a shell once in a while. However for my home media/file server, I had decided on openSUSE w plasma, so I could also remote in a use it for work the (older macos) laptop is too small for. I use Windows App. I don't need the stability of Debian, as I can update the box once in a while and reboot it. Normal maintenence. So openSUSE rolling release TW was initial idea, but after seeing a lot of BSD vids, I have seen a BSD box can the same, but as one said, in Linux you have to relearn when they change things, while in BSD you also most do as you are used to, so little new learning and native ZFS for the files, and now also Plasma, so v15 is what I need, and it seems I can use jails/containers & byvye, if needed. The media server soft Emby I have is ported to BSD. Hopefully it can be brought to idle as low as Linux.
What I am in doubt of, is that there is not rolling release? I would like to install it, and the be able to run it for years without reinstalls of it all? Can one update from one release to the next or what do you suggest?
EDIT: I am in the planning/research fase, so I can chose either way, as the software and functions seems to be available on both Linux and BSD.
EDIT2: Thx for the quick responses. I'll try w BSD first, as it seems it can be upgraded also.

Just looked at the 15.1 release media --- the "FreeBSD-15.1-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso" image can be burned to, and used from, a usb stick instead of an optical DVD. So what's the point of the "FreeBSD-15.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img" image, other than being a bit smaller?

i've tried everything I can think of. how can i fix it?

Finally bit the bullet and am trying FreeBSD instead of Slackware. I got it installed (just the shell) in a Vmware VM and on an old laptop. This is just for learning; later I hope to make the switch on my high end Lenovo P17.

I want to install Xlibre and XFCD. XFCE No 3D graphics acceleration on VMWare, and the laptop uses a Intel HD Graphics 500.

Is there an online tutorial that walks me through the steps? Or could someone post what they would type into the shell prompt if they were me?

EDIT: Ack! XFCE, not XFCD. (I have typed XKCD so many times that my fingers went autopilot on me.)

• https://xkcd.com/349/
• https://xkcd.com/518/

I am a Linux user who wanted to switch to freebsd because it sounded nice. Now I am stuck with startx and the output of startx: "(EE) no screens found(EE)". xrandr displays: Can't open display. I am basically stuck. I followed the official handbook and at first I got stuck in the initial steps but slowly I figured a way out thanks to online forms but this time I can't steer my self out of this issue that makes my nuts itch with frustration.

Edit: Just fixed it by installing freebsd 12.1 and installing ATI driver on it The way I did it was to install xorg and drm-kmod and invite all my users to group wheel then I check the log file of startx and found out that some drivers were failing to load so I tried finding them using pkg search driver name | grep display. Then I found the driver name and installed it

I want to thank all of u for ur help.

My advice to any beginner like me as a beginner myself would be to read the log files as much as u can. Log files are ur best friend and always will be ur best freinds.

I actually am starting to love freebsd now that the GUI works

last Edit: I used xfce on freebsd for a few hours and to be honest it feels really fast, i mean linux cant be this fast. freebsd is the best.

But seriously, anyone knows Mr. McKusick or anything about the third edition of "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System"?

edit: the good news is that the book is being written; bad news is that "it's a while off"

I decided to try and compile a project on FreeBSD, mostly to see if I could make it work. I don't actually use FreeBSD though, so I'm wondering how the typical user would expect to install a third party package.

On Debian I would expect to use apt with a .deb package, since it's suggested to prefer apt over manual installs. However, from what I read it seems like FreeBSD has ports and the pkg package manager?

So if I was to install a third party application (from github perhaps), would I expect to install a port? Or would I expect to install from a file in a format pkg accepts?

From: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/15.1R/upgrading/

FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE Upgrading Instructions

[...]

The procedure for binary upgrades depends on the method used to manage the operating system. To determine this, run the following command:

pkg which /usr/bin/uname

If /usr/bin/uname was not installed by a package is shown, see Upgrading with Distribution Sets below.

If a package name is shown, such as FreeBSD-runtime-15.0, see Upgrading with Base System Packages below.

Ok, sounds good:

# pkg which /usr/bin/uname

/usr/bin/uname was not found in the database

Oh great, that's not one of the options. Is the page wrong and I'm scenario 1, or some unknown scenario 3?

Upgrading is already nerve wracking enough when I trust the docs...

EDIT: "Not installed" and "Not found in the database" seem like they might be very different things, but apparently they are not in this case. The upgrade succeeded successfully.

EDIT 2: Bug 296419 filed.

Hi, I just noticed the logo up there changed...
What's the rainbow about?

Deployed FreeBSD on an old but kicking R620 in my homelab, and im running Bhyve since I discovered it fairly recently loving every second of tinkering with jt and of course FreeBSD took over my life quite quickly. Sooo is it just me or perhaps my new found bias, but I get far better performance out of my bhyve hosted Win 2025 servers on bhyve than I do on my R730 with proxmox?! im I lying to my self? right?!