I updated my laptop SSD install of Nomad on Oct 28, 2022. I hadn’t updated in a couple months, so this was a BIG one. Now I can only log in to command line. No desktop. I haven’t yet started trouble shooting, so I’ll post more info when I do. I was hoping somebody else had run into this and had already found a solution.
HP Inspiron 7569
1TB SATA M.2 SSD
Nomad installed on SSD was functioning fine before update. Used the installed ap for the update, then rebooted. Boots to command line.
UPDATE:
I got tired of messing with Nomad, so I did pkg install xfce and xfce4-goodies, then followed the instructions at the end regarding the usm and psm drivers, then rebooted. I was expecting to simply create a new desktop and just bypass Nomad’s desktop.
Voila! My Nomad desktop came back up, tracpad works, all is well. Must have been something in the xfce updates that broke my Nomad install. So I’ll label this thread SOLVED.
NomadBSD can be very tricky to update especially when big updates are on the schedule. This was even trickier without the nomadbsd-update tool that launched in the latest release of NomadBSD. Did not get to try it out but I am going to once I figure out where to (re-)install and return to NomadBSD after it crashed miserably and failed to boot up after I made the under-the-hood jump to FreeBSD 13.1 months ago. I use OpenBSD for the time being on my speedy microSD card and I do not think I will change that any time soon because while OpenBSD is known for being proactively secure, consistent, standardized, correct, it is also very portable and rock-solid stable as hell. It can replace NomadBSD easily and this is what I have done. It works like a charme even when not updated in months or years (which you definitely should not do).
I still have nomad installed on a laptop. Haven’t tried the usb in ages. It does what I need it to do so far. It hasn’t given me any trouble, even with big updates, in awhile, so I’ll keep using it on that particular laptop until it does. I like the way I have it set up, but I have already decided that if it starts giving me problems again, I’m just going back to good old reliable vanilla FreeBSD and set it up the way I like it and just leave it at that. I just thought having BSD on a thumb drive would be handy, but as it turns out, I haven’t used it at all, so nomad is my laptop bsd. I have GhostBSD on another old laptop as well, and it seems to function well and is pretty lightweight. Maybe I’ll give OpenBSD a try as well. I have a 1TB nvme in a small enclosure that connects via usbC, so OpenBSD on that might prove interesting.
Really glad to hear that NomadBSD worked for you on that old crusty laptop. I was not so lucky as I elaborated above. I was always fascinated by the idea running an OS off of an USB thumb drive since I heard about NomadBSD so I gave it a try.
If I look back at the relatively short time now I used NomadBSD on and off the macOS-like design of the Openbox WM had its charming appeal to say the least and OS was loaded with programs, most of them I did not need for my daily tasks which everyone else in the tech scene would consider those programs installed by NomadBSD as bloatware but like everyone else here in the forum I thought it would be better to keep the programs because for one for compatibility and OS integrety reasons and for two I thought some programs might become in handy in the future, so yeah… I kept them on the USB stick, later on the microSD card inside the USB adapter. What I am sure about is I will give NomadBSD a second chance in the future but for now I keep everything as is.
Have not extensively tried GhostBSD yet, athough I played with it in a live environment once or twice but if I recall it right, the reason I did not opt for the Ghost was the fact that the internal WiFi/Bluetooth card in my main laptop was not detected by GhostBSD as I really wanted to replace my Linux Mint installation with GhostBSD on that laptop and because that laptop is my daily driver I wanted everything to “just work” out of the box. That did not work so I stayed on Linux Mint at least for that time being. Now I am on LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) on my daily one for various reasons but I will not go into detail here why I switched over from LM main edition to LMDE.
Regarding OpenBSD, you should definetely give it a try for its simplicity, minimalism and poweruser-friendliness alone. The iso is around 700-750 MB large, so no bloat there, just the essentials to get you started, which makes a perfect fit for a portable install on a USB flash drive, by the way; the text based install is super easy, you hit most of the time because of the sane defaults and after the installation you reboot into your new system with everything preconfigured, hell, it comes with Xorg and 3 window managers even to choose from, it comes with many old UNIX games and lovely artwork, wallpapers and songs created by the OpenBSD dev team, apart from the OpenBSD kernel, coreutils, binutils, the LLVM compiler suite and the phenomenal, super high-quality offline manual pages as well as the many in-house made programs, some of which made it into FreeBSD and even Linux, like sudo or its replacement doas(2) or tmux(4), sndio(4), OpenSSH, LibreSSL, httpd, mandoc and many more. The standard window manager that OpenBSD boots into after first boot is fvwm(v2) but good old Xorg’s twm and also cwm (the calm window manager, an evilwm clone) are also installed by default and are super easily customizable to your hearts’ content. The default shell on OpenBSD is OpenBSD’s own edition of (pd)ksh and just like on GNU/Linux, /bin/sh is a symlink/an alias for /bin/ksh… To keep it short, OpenBSD feels like Linux the way it should be designed from the very start. As you might have guessed, I fell in love with OpenBSD and I hope you will, too.