UEFI and FreeBSD-11

[James B. Byrne]

On Thu, July 20, 2017 20:02, James B. Byrne wrote:
> My CentOS-6 based workstation is dying a slow death due to bit rot and
> so I decided to swap out the existing disc drive for another.  Given
> that I had to reinstall anyway I decided that now was the time to try
> out FreeBSD-11 as a desktop.
>
> This Intel based system had UEFI enabled.  Apparently this may have a
> surprising, to me, effect on the video display used for the system
> console in text mode.  For whatever reason the boot process insists on
> treating a 480x640 60Hz display as 800 x 480 at some other refresh
> rate, probably 75Hz.  This produces a difficult to read flickering
> display and oddball presentation artifacts such as typing at a cursor
> presented mid way from the top over existing text and displaying the
> output at the bottom of the screen.
>
> Is this a known phenomenon? Is there something that I am supposed to
> do to get this to work properly or do I just disable UEFI?
>
>


This problem was fixed by updating the BIOS firmware on the host.  I
have since successfully installed the mate desktop, upon which I am
composing this message.  I have a small remaining difficulty
respecting the display.

I am using a HDMI interface with an ASUS VP239 1920x1080 monitor. 
However, FreeBSD / Mate does not recognise this monitor nor can I
discover how to manually set the resolution from inside mate.

System > Preferences > Hardware > Displays

Shows: Monitor Unknown, Resolution 1280 x 1024 (which is the maximum
value in the scroll bar), Refresh rate 0 (and cannot be altered),
Rotation Normal.  Detect monitors has no apparent effect.

What is the procedure to update FreeBSD to handle the monitor that I
have?

Thanks
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James B. Byrne                mailto:ByrneJB at Harte-Lyne.ca
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