Warning: there may be occasional oddness due to css and blog edits. **remodel of posts done. Overhaul of pages (distilled) in progress 3/9

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

scfb our last resort

It seems that I am cursed to revisit the use of scfb as my graphics driver once more.  I ran into problems with my graphics again and I cannot say exactly why everything remained broken.  I looked over the Broke GUI recovery blog post I made to be sure I hadn't missed anything.  I did very similarly to how I described the steps at the end, but the amdgpu driver would not tell xlibre-server that there were screens for it.

pkg install 11vm
graphics/mesa-dri
graphics/drm-kmod
x11-drivers/xlibre-drivers
x11/xinit
x11/xauth
x11/xterm
pkg install rust
pkg install cargo-c
x11/libxkbcommon
x11/xrdb
x11/xset
x11/xrandr
fvwm

And later I added a few more things, three of them fill gaps in my fvwm environment.

graphics/feh
audio/umix
x11-clocks/dclock
www/librewolf

It used to be that our last resort graphics driver was vesa, but on a 4k monitor, this is truly a waste and as in the past, makes a GUI almost unusable.  Now our unwanted but functional option is scfb which has considerably better resolution but with some quirks.  If you switch to another tty for any reason, when you return your desktop may have a layer of black covering it, concealing any desktop graphic you may have.  This seems to be the only oddity and it may not even be due to scfb, I cannot be sure.

When I ran into by broken graphics issue, I assumed it was purely due to a large update of pkgs and perhaps something got uninstalled, or there may have been a conflict of versions in some way.  What confused me much longer than it ought to have, since I had been down this road before, was that I could get back to a simple text-only interface if I disabled the automatic load of the amdgpu kernel object.  Every time it tried to load it during boot, I would have a panic and reboot.  This made me believe there were other problems.  When I finally came to my senses and disabled the amdgpu from loading, I would no longer need to use single user for any changes.

The good and bad news became that even after the complete removal via pkg delete -af as I have done a few times now, and the reinstall of that list of things above, allowing amdgpu to load didn't cause a panic and reboot.  Now, if I try to startx all I get is the famously frustrating "no screens found" error.  I tried reinstalling different things, different versions of a few things, but no change in my situation.  So once again I wait for whatever it is that was broken outside of my control to be fixed again, but until then I use scfb our last resort.

No comments:

Frequently viewed this week