I moved my Dell laptop from Devuan Linux to FreeBSD and here are some things I needed to do and some things I did for convenience….
I found the basic install of the recommended drm-kmod package and i915kms driver wouldn't work - it crashed/hung during boot.
Removing this package and using the SCFB video driver worked, but didn't give (for example) DPMS control of the LCD screen.
I used SCFB temporarily be adding an xorg conf file 20-vesa.conf to /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/
Section "Device" Identifier "Card0" Driver "scfb" EndSection
This was a reasonable workaround, but I found the solution to using correct Intel i915kms driver here : https://blog.hofstede.it/freebsd-150-on-the-thinkpad-t480-efficient-stable-and-8-hours-on-battery/
This is what worked:
drm-latest-kmod
gpu-firmware-intel-kmod-kabylake
kld_list="i915kms"
# Graphics and power tuning i915kms_load="YES" drm.i915.enable_rc6=7 drm.i915.enable_fbc=1 drm.i915.lvds_downclock=1 drm.i915.enable_psr=1 compat.linuxkpi.i915_disable_power_well="0"
i915kms now loads and I have access to DPMS for turning off the LCD
screen.
I made a few small shell scripts to assist in controlling the battery consumption by being able to alter LCD brightness, and turn the LCD off via DPMS and makde i3 shorcuts to them.
(later I made the same key actions for DWM when I moved back to using DWM)
now I can “$mod+Shift+o” to reduce brightness and “$mod+Shift+p” to increase it, and “$mod+Shift+i” to turn the LCD screen off completely.
I also added a devd rule to turn the LCD screen off when the lid is closed - this confused me initially, as it worked when testing it by adding the rule, restarting devd and testing, from within an X-Session…. but didn't work when devd was started during bootup…
This was due to the lack of DISPLAY if the script was triggered
from “outside” the X session. Changing the script to set the
DISPLAY variable was the solution.
notify 20 {
match "system" "ACPI";
match "subsystem" "Lid";
match "notify" "0x01";
action "/home/g4slv/bin/on";
};
notify 20 {
match "system" "ACPI";
match "subsystem" "Lid";
match "notify" "0x00";
action "/home/g4slv/bin/off";
};
The lid actions call one of these →
~/bin/on
#!/usr/local/bin/bash su g4slv -c 'setenv DISPLAY :0.0 && /usr/local/bin/xset dpms force on'
~/bin/off
#!/usr/local/bin/bash su g4slv -c 'setenv DISPLAY :0.0 && /usr/local/bin/xset dpms force off'
Small scripts to automate swithing between Wifi and Ethernet
#!/bin/sh
doas service netif stop em0
doas service netif start wlan0
doas service dhclient restart wlan0
#!/bin/sh
doas service netif stop wlan0
doas service netif start em0
doas service dhclient restart em0
hostname="proton" keymap="uk.kbd" wlans_iwm0="wlan0" ifconfig_wlan0="WPA DHCP" ip6addrctl_enable="NO" ipv6_activate_all_interfaces="NO" ifconfig_wlan0_ipv6="inet6 ifdisabled" ifconfig_em0_ipv6="inet6 ifdisabled" ifconfig_lo0_ipv6="inet6 ifdisabled" create_args_wlan0="country GB regdomain NONE" sshd_enable="YES" sshd_flags="-4" ntpd_enable="YES" ntpd_sync_on_start="YES" ntpd_flags="-4" ftpd_enable="YES" ftpd_flags="-4" moused_nondefault_enable="NO" # Set dumpdev to "AUTO" to enable crash dumps, "NO" to disable dumpdev="AUTO" zfs_enable="YES" cupsd_enable="YES" devfs_system_ruleset="system" dbus_enable="YES" avahi_daemon_enable="YES" avahi_dnsconfd_enable="YES" inetd_enable="YES" rwhod_enable="YES" kld_list="i915kms" powerd_enable="YES" powerd_flags="-a adaptive -b minimum " update_motd="NO" dynamic_motd="YES" ifconfig_em0="DHCP" autofs_enable="YES"
kern.geom.label.disk_ident.enable="0" kern.geom.label.gptid.enable="0" zfs_load="YES" i915kms_load="YES" drm.i915.enable_rc6="7" drm.i915.semaphores="1" drm.i915.enable_fbc="1" drm.i915.lvds_downclock=1 drm.i915.enable_psr=1 compat.linuxkpi.i915_disable_power_well="0" fuse_load="YES" iwm8265fw_load="YES"
xrdb -load ~/.Xdefaults setxkbmap -layout gb xset s noblank xset s noexpose xset dpms 600 660 670 backlight 40 eval $(gnome-keyring-daemon --start) export SSH_AUTH_LOCK feh --bg-center -B "#005577" ~/freebsd.svg pulseaudio & dwmblocks & pasystray & nextcloud & exec dbus-launch --exit-with-x11 dwm
Here's the list of intentionally installed packages currently
FreeBSD-kernel-generic FreeBSD-kernel-generic-dbg FreeBSD-set-base FreeBSD-set-lib32 FreeBSD-set-minimal alpine ansilove automount avahi bash bombadillo claws-mail claws-mail-bogofilter claws-mail-dillo claws-mail-pdf_viewer detox dmidecode doas drm-latest-kmod dunst dynamic_motd evince feh ffmpegthumbnailer figlet firefox-esr fldigi foomatic-db-hpijs freebsd-ftpd freebsd-telnetd fusefs-jmtpfs gmake gnome-keyring gnucash gopher gpu-firmware-intel-kmod-kabylake gvfs hplip i3blocks imv iperf libptytty libreoffice librewolf lynx mixertui most mousepad mpv musikcube nano neofetch nextcloudclient nss_mdns openshot pasystray pavucontrol pcmanfm pkg pkgconf polo py311-i3ipc py311-pip rename rsync sacc scrot setsid shotwell slock slrn thunar thunar-archive-plugin tightvnc tmux vim vlc wireshark xarchiver xorg yt-dlp zip
Page created : 04/06/26 11:04 BST
Page updated : 04/06/26 19:11 BST