Cinnamon Won't Start in FreeBSD 11.1

[Deleted member 30996]

...consider that this is a 10 year old laptop that I am setting up for my daughter.

All my machines are 2008 vintage or earlier and I run x11-wm/fluxbox on all of them. I have multimedia/vlc on all of them, too, so I'm not sure why you're having problems in that area.

You would do well to make a thread of your own outlining any other problems you have. It's more likely to be seen that way.

 

[Sensucht94]

Before directing me to a different DE, consider that this is a 10 year old laptop that I am setting up for my daughter. The goal is a light-weight replacement for XP that was on it to do basic web browsing.

I love Cinnamon, a pity to hear it is currently unmaintained in FreeBSD. Anyway,my recommendation for a lightweight DE is LXQt, available also in FreeBSD in Beta (tested it recently): LXQt in FreeBSD

However consider that on older hardware WMs perform better than DEs, as they are far less resource-avid. Fluxbox, Openbox, WMii, JWM and IceWM are good recommendation for stacking WMs; Ratpoison, Bspwm, XMonad and i3 for tiling ones

 

[tripseven]

I'm running an 8 year old HP Probook 4530s laptop and I'm simply amazed how lightweight FreeBSD is with Fluxbox WM. I've yet to use 1G ram out my 4G while streaming 4k vids and DVDs. Highest CPU temp was 104F. Linux/Cinnamon ran OK but ate 3G+ ram and hit 190F+ at times while doing same. If I didn't know any better I'd be thinking I bought a new machine

 

[Chris_H]

I have used Cinnamon. I was introduced to it, when I was evaluating a Linux that used the FreeBSD kernel. It didn't work really well on it. But I kinda liked it, so installed it on one of my FreeBSD boxes. It caused me much grief -- and I've been on FreeBSD for some 30yrs. Anyway, the only way I was able to finally get it to work; was to turn on a debugging switch, and force it to create a log file. So I could figure out why it was NOT working. My (initial) experience was much the same as yours (black screen, and all). With the debug switch, and the log file, I was finally able to get to start. But I still ended up with core files in my user dir, and finally decided it just wasn't worth it.
If I were you, I'd go with Xfce4 ( x11-wm/xfce4-wm ). It just works, and has everything you need in a WM without the hassle. It has many Themes to choose from. So it should easily satisfy your needs.

HTH

--Chris

 

[tripseven]

If I were you, I'd go with Xfce4 ( x11-wm/xfce4-wm ).

I looked at that and several other DEs including MATE, which is installed but haven't ran. But I got to fiddling with Fluxbox WM and realized the absolute control of WMs. I'm nowhere near where I want to be with it but I'm having fun figuring it out...with help of course!

Now if someone could help me figure out how to uninstall MATE...JK! And no offense MATE users! Run what ya like...that's the beauty of it all in a free world

Thank you for your input Sir!

 

[Chris_H]

...
Now if someone could help me figure out how to uninstall MATE...JK! And no offense MATE users! Run what ya like...that's the beauty of it all in a free world

Heh. Sure...
cd /usr/ports/x11/mate
make deinstall
Depending on your setup, the following may also hold true...
pkg delete mate
followed by...
pkg autoremove
the last one removes any cruft left over from x11/mate (and anything else, for that matter.).
See pkg(8) for all the finite details.

Thank you for your input Sir!

You are very welcome.

HTH

--Chris

 

[tonyhain]

All my machines are 2008 vintage or earlier and I run x11-wm/fluxbox on all of them. I have multimedia/vlc on all of them, too, so I'm not sure why you're having problems in that area.

You would do well to make a thread of your own outlining any other problems you have. It's more likely to be seen that way.

I would create a separate thread if I thought there was something worth digging into. I finally gave up on trying to fix all the version errors and set /usr/local/bin/python -> python2.7 instead of 3.6, then recompiled the vlc port with an explicit selection of qt4. For what this machine needs to do, things are working.

What the docs and the forum comments don't say is that to make things work you have to use specific old versions of dependencies. I assume that everyone that claims it works hasn't tried a fresh install for quite awhile, and if they did they knew to pick old versions because it isn't documented anywhere that i could find. Fortunately I don't need to run anything that requires python3 as the default, or I would be starting a new thread to chase down the remaining broken syntax issues. Those are likely not FreeBSD specific though, unless the Linux version of Cinnamon has been fixed and just not updated here yet.

 

[CraigHB]

Because of my ADHD I use FVWM because it is not like a Las Vegas Strip blinking on my screen. The only WM widget I have on screen is the 48-screen pager. No icons, trays, bars, menus and all that stuff that annoys me because it distracts me.

That's good to hear. I'm waiting for another disk I have an order to set up FreeBSD on the desktop for the first time, don't have space for it right now. Currently running Debian. I've been using fvwm for a long time. Glad to hear it runs on FreeBSD. I still use a number of widgets so it's not bare bones, but I like the overhead is a lot lower than a full desktop environment. I agree it can be tedious to configure, but it's not like you have to do it all the time. Still pretty easy to add new apps to it when necessary.