[rescue] Dell Laptop, FreeBSD & Xorg

[Nathan Raymond]

On Mon, Mar 2, 2020 at 7:55 PM William Barnett-Lewis <wlewisiii at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Set up rc.conf - dbus = yes, hald=yes, moused=yes Turned on XDM in
> ttys. Boots fine. XDM pops up. Input login data and boom. Totally
> nothing responds. Black background. Pointer won't move. Plug in USB
> mouse- nothing there either.
>
> Got me scratching my head. Any ideas?
>

When a *BSD or Linux distro on a PC goes all wonky with graphical X11 I
drop to one of the pure text virtual consoles, which still operate
regardless of whether X11 is borked or not:

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/consoles.html

The key combinations Alt+F1 through Alt+F8 have been reserved by FreeBSD
> for switching between virtual consoles. Use Alt+F1 to switch to the system
> console (ttyv0), Alt+F2 to access the first virtual console (ttyv1), Alt+F3
> to access the second virtual console (ttyv2), and so on. When using Xorg as
> a graphical console, the combination becomes Ctrl+Alt+F1 to return to a
> text-based virtual console.


> When switching from one console to the next, FreeBSD manages the screen
> output. The result is an illusion of having multiple virtual screens and
> keyboards that can be used to type commands for FreeBSD to run. The
> programs that are launched in one virtual console do not stop running when
> the user switches to a different virtual console.


Then I poke around log files to see what's going on and figure out a fix.

- Nate