Using FreeBSD as Desktop OS

I think the conversation has moved on since September 13th! XD

But get back to me in a couple of years and I am pretty sure your opinion will have changed.

Also you should not take offense by technical predictions. The lifespan of a piece of Microsoft software is not a reflection upon VB.NET developers.

Investing time and energy in Microsoft Programming Languages is uncertain, because Microsoft can anytime change radically. Except maybe DOC or DOCX, that might be more stable. Actually, ... formatting changes.
 
Hi everybody,

For those that are interested in a simple way to have a FreeBSD desktop fully functional in less than 20 minutes this is my personal how-to to do it. It's in my native language (spanish) but I hope it help you. This have some links to another documents that teach how to install every desktop (Gnome, KDE, XFCE, E17... and even CDE!).


Regards

Have you found E17 to stop being responsive to clicking? IE: It will randomly lockup for me if I click the 'start' menu. Sometimes it will shake out whereas others it will just stop working forcing me to kill X.

This has consistently happened to me on two separate systems.
 
My brother got himself a Macbook Air and had no use for his Lenovo laptop. Decided that it would be a great test bench for a FreeBSD install...
So far I did a great installation and used the KDE5 Plasma desktop. It worked brilliantly. However I was looking at the stuff like OpenBox and I really wanted to give it a go. So far the installation is going well.
I'm looking through this link... https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/03/29/freebsd-desktop-part-1-simplified-boot/
It's a really comprehensive guide, but kind of over the top for me. Half of the stuff I don't understand what to do. I know that there are scripts that I need to install, etc., but how to get them working, I'm not sure.
So far I have the basic of Openbox working and I'm trying to install Firefox, but it seems to have disappeared off the repos.
I don't know of another browser that I could install on FreeBSD.
 
I see firefox in the repos on my end (I'm using the "latest" repository) but I noticed it's been downgraded to version 65 instead of 66. I prefer Chromium because it seems to perform better for me, especially with google services like maps.
 
I see firefox in the repos on my end (I'm using the "latest" repository) but I noticed it's been downgraded to version 65 instead of 66. I prefer Chromium because it seems to perform better for me, especially with google services like maps.
I used pkg update to get the latest. It still doesn't show up for me. I'm using amd64 version. Does that make a difference?
 
With regards to setting up open box..
What is another good panel that I can use instead of tint2 and xfce4 panel?

I'm trying to increase the screen resolution for the boot up sequence. Any ideas how I can do that?
 
I used pkg update to get the latest. It still doesn't show up for me. I'm using amd64 version. Does that make a difference?

No I meant I'm using the "latest" repo instead of "quarterly" by editing /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf. Seeing as they downgraded maybe there's something wrong with the new builds.
 
I used pkg update to get the latest. It still doesn't show up for me. I'm using amd64 version. Does that make a difference?

Interesting - doesn't show for me either - SirDice mentioned in another thread Thread 69969 that it may have failed to build in one of the repos so isn't available. I use whatever the out of the box repo is. I only show:

Code:
firefox-esr-60.5.2,1           Web browser based on the browser portion of Mozilla
firefox-esr-i18n-60.5.2        Localized interface for Firefox
xpi-firefox-showcase-0.9.5.6   Easily locate and select any open browser window
 
With regards to setting up open box..
What is another good panel that I can use instead of tint2 and xfce4 panel?

I'm trying to increase the screen resolution for the boot up sequence. Any ideas how I can do that?
Do you want the same resolution that you have in openbox, and, if so, what resolution is that?
Interesting - doesn't show for me either - SirDice mentioned in another thread Thread 420642 that it may have failed to build in one of the repos so isn't available. I use whatever the out of the box repo is. I only show:

Code:
firefox-esr-60.5.2,1           Web browser based on the browser portion of Mozilla
firefox-esr-i18n-60.5.2        Localized interface for Firefox
xpi-firefox-showcase-0.9.5.6   Easily locate and select any open browser window
I also use the out of the box repo and it says "quarterly" in my /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf. I just changed it to "latest" and now I'm getting:
Code:
(del@dellfp10 /home/del)# pkg search firefox
pkg: Repository FreeBSD has a wrong packagesite, need to re-create database
firefox-66.0_1,1               Web browser based on the browser portion of Mozilla
firefox-esr-60.5.2_1,1         Web browser based on the browser portion of Mozilla
firefox-esr-i18n-60.5.2        Localized interface for Firefox
firefox-i18n-66.0              Localized interface for Firefox
xpi-firefox-showcase-0.9.5.6   Easily locate and select any open browser window
(del@dellfp10 /home/del)#
... so I learned how to do something useful today thanks to tedbell. It hung for about a minute while it re-created the database.
 
Oh nice - so, does "latest" in any way infer "unstable" or is it more closely aligned with the update frequency of ports?
I changed it back; I'll stick with the default configuration for now, but it's nice to know I'd be able to install it if I wanted or needed to do so.
 
In pursuit of a more direct answer to that question, I'm now reading these two threads:


 
Updated to "latest", will run for a few days to see how she does.
Some of the information in those threads may or may not be outdated, but I took SirDice's advice from this post, where he says (paraphasing) Don't edit [/etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf], instead create a [new] /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf and use it to overrule the default settings. So I tried it that way too, and it works the same. It was necessary to run mkdir /usr/local/etc/pkg; mkdir /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos, also as per SirDice's instructions, before I could save the file, because those directories didn't exist before I created them. In the newly created FreeBSD.conf file, I copied and pasted:
Code:
FreeBSD: {
  url: "pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/quarterly",
  mirror_type: "srv",
  signature_type: "fingerprints",
  fingerprints: "/usr/share/keys/pkg",
  enabled: yes
}
... from /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf into /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf and then edited it to say "latest" instead of "quarterly" before saving it. I used vi as my editor because I'm old skool like that. :)
 
With regards to setting up open box..
What is another good panel that I can use instead of tint2 and xfce4 panel?

I'm trying to increase the screen resolution for the boot up sequence. Any ideas how I can do that?

Polybar is a pretty good panel.
Oh nice - so, does "latest" in any way infer "unstable" or is it more closely aligned with the update frequency of ports?
I think the latter. I switched to get the latest software.
 
Do you want the same resolution that you have in openbox, and, if so, what resolution is that?
How do I find that out? It would be great for me to know. Because I notice that the resolution is just perfect when I'm using xterm. But everything seems a bit oversized when I'm using another terminal app or another application like a file manager, etc.

tedbell Thanks for the suggestion.
 
I don't use openbox I use KDE. I could tell you how to check it in KDE. If I load a graphics driver like drm-kmod's i915kms driver, it changes my resolution to a higher setting during the boot up process, but that all depends on what kind of graphics driver your system has.
 
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