I have an HP t740 Thin Client (AMD Ryzen V1756B) that a installed FreeBSD on. I did this once before with pfSense (based on FreeBSD) on another HP t740 that I use for internet access. FreeBSD works fine on my t740 KDE Plasma attempt. I had to adjust a BIOS entry to recognize the 2TB Crucial SSD and have no problems so far with the basic FreeBSD OS. The SSD is encrypted. I’m coming from Gnome Desktop with Ubuntu and wanted to try something different and wanted another t740 like my FreeBSD t740 with pfSense.
When the FreeBSD graphic and menu selection appear first on start up, I choose multiuser. At first I get a black screen after my multiuser choice, then the monitor tells me it lost the video signal, then the video signal comes back with a black screen, then the Plasma desktop appears. This all takes maybe 30 seconds. I have root and one user configured. I put the password in for the user and I have gotten the KDE icon with the turning gear, but a series of pop up windows are warning me about no write access is available. The first pop up says “No write access to $HOME directory (/home/main), Plasma is unable to start”. Another pop up says “Configuration file /home/main/.config/ ActivityManagerrc not writable”. All of the pop ups say something about no access and there are several of them I have to close.
This is my second time wiping the SSD and starting over with this little project and I want to be careful not to cause further problems. I used information from the KDE website page FreeBSD/Setup about Plasma installs on FreeBSD. I took note of the information on the FreeBSD site.
I have installed:
FreeBSD 14.2
kde5
drm-kmod
xf86-video-amdgpu
x11/sddm
xorg
dbus
nano
sudo
I configured sddm by creating the file at /usr/local/etc/polkit-1/rules-d/40-wheel-group.rules as mentioned and it looks identical in format to the one on the KDE site like a program. I made the /etc/rc.conf additions as described on the FreeBSD site. I have root and the user part of the “video” group and checked it with the “nano” editor. I also have “sudo” installed just in case. I also have the .xinitrc file and user session text in the /home directory. I have the sysctl net.local.stream.recvspace and sendspace text in place.
I’m ready to try some advice to get this going. I have no problem editing files with nano if I can find the correct files. Thanks.