Troubleshooting

The live system does not boot.

If Secure Boot is enabled, in BIOS settings for your computer, disable it.

Support for Secure Boot is not yet integral to FreeBSD.

Your hardware may not be supported.

GhostBSD is based on the STABLE branch of FreeBSD. Hardware support is generally good, however, there may be issues with some modern hardware.

To determine whether the issue relates to hardware, or to the USB drive:

  • try to boot from the same drive on a different computer.

For information about hardware components, please see FreeBSD information for the RELEASE that corresponds to the version of STABLE used by GhostBSD.

You can run ghostbsd-version -kv to show the version number. As an example, 1401502 was from the 14.1-STABLE branch, and hardware information is amongst the pages at https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.1R/.

The installation media may be corrupted.

Corruption may occur during download of an installer image file, or during creation of a bootable USB flash drive. Please refer to the Getting started guide to download a new image and create a new bootable USB flash drive.

The live system does not reach a graphical desktop environment.

GhostBSD automated configuration does not support some dual-GPU configurations.

Symptoms may include:

  • Setting up (Intel DRM).. Please wait.. – on screen, no progress beyond this line

  • a mostly black screen – a white rectangle in the upper left corner, with a pointer that can not be moved.

Auto-config (kernel modules, other graphics drivers, X.Org) may fail with, for example:

If your computer BIOS allows one of two GPUs to be disabled: please make this setting before your next attempt to boot the live system.

Users of affected Apple hardware may find it impossible to set the Mac to use a single GPU.

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Please note: this section is incomplete.