I've been away from the various *BSD for a while but decided I wanted to try some development work in FreeBSD.
I'd like to do that dev. work in a desktop installation running as a guest under VMware Fusion (on MacOS).
So I downloaded 12.2 and installed in a new VM. Installation went mostly OK (though I naively tried to install for UEFI BIOS which had problems -- no biggie). That gave me a familiar BSD looking shell. So... how to get a graphical login? Some web searching...
The results pointed many different directions based on whether one prefers KDE, Gnome, Mate, etc. Personally I'm more familiar with Gnome 2 (now Mate) and most instructions for that suggested:
And add to /etc/rc.conf
After a reboot, that gave me a login screen, but attempts to logon fail (even with a correct p/w).
Further searching suggests creating a $HOME/.xinitrc containing "exec mate-session"...
which I happen to know is really not the right way to be doing that...
So I look around some more and see that a lot of my search results were quite old (2015 or so) and that the "slim" display manager is no longer being maintained, etc. On another system I use, I have mate + lightDM so I thought I'd try that. Very few of my search results suggested that, and only a couple hinted at how to do it, but with some experiments I came up with:
(Note: Already installed "xorg" and "mate" above.)
and replace the "slim" line of rc.conf so the end looks like:
After that, login works as expected (and no, it's not necessary to create a $HOME/.xinitrc nor should it be necessary).
I will say that the "slim" greeter was more attractive, but I'm pretty sure that's only because nobody has added any branding stuff (eg. default background) to the lightDM greeter. Maybe I'll try doing so...
Anyway, I hope this note shows up in the search results of the next person looking for a "mate" installation.
Lastly, let me say "Thanks!" -- these are minor documentation problems. The important things all work.
I'd like to do that dev. work in a desktop installation running as a guest under VMware Fusion (on MacOS).
So I downloaded 12.2 and installed in a new VM. Installation went mostly OK (though I naively tried to install for UEFI BIOS which had problems -- no biggie). That gave me a familiar BSD looking shell. So... how to get a graphical login? Some web searching...
The results pointed many different directions based on whether one prefers KDE, Gnome, Mate, etc. Personally I'm more familiar with Gnome 2 (now Mate) and most instructions for that suggested:
Code:
pkg install xorg mate slim
Code:
dbus_enable="YES"
hald_enable="YES"
slim_enable="YES"
After a reboot, that gave me a login screen, but attempts to logon fail (even with a correct p/w).
Further searching suggests creating a $HOME/.xinitrc containing "exec mate-session"...
which I happen to know is really not the right way to be doing that...
So I look around some more and see that a lot of my search results were quite old (2015 or so) and that the "slim" display manager is no longer being maintained, etc. On another system I use, I have mate + lightDM so I thought I'd try that. Very few of my search results suggested that, and only a couple hinted at how to do it, but with some experiments I came up with:
(Note: Already installed "xorg" and "mate" above.)
Code:
pkg delete slim
pkg install lightdm lightdm-gtk-greeter
Code:
dbus_enable="YES"
hald_enable="YES"
lightdm_enable="YES"
After that, login works as expected (and no, it's not necessary to create a $HOME/.xinitrc nor should it be necessary).
I will say that the "slim" greeter was more attractive, but I'm pretty sure that's only because nobody has added any branding stuff (eg. default background) to the lightDM greeter. Maybe I'll try doing so...
Anyway, I hope this note shows up in the search results of the next person looking for a "mate" installation.
Lastly, let me say "Thanks!" -- these are minor documentation problems. The important things all work.