Other Are there any "live boot" samplers for a wide variety of GUIs?

[l008com]

The correct entry in rc.conf should be sddm_enable="YES"
Maybe that's the problem. Just try.

Just tried it, no change.

Not that none of the other "YES"es in rc.conf are in quotes either, so I didn't expect it to make a difference.

 

[mer]

I don't use SDDM or any other gui based login, but looking at the ports tree for it https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/tree/x11/sddm I don't see any kind of "init" file that could be started by the service command. If there was I would expect to see it in the pkg-plist.
A quick way to check would be "sudo service -l | grep -i sddm" and see if there is anything.
If so, what happens if you do "service sddm start" ?

 

[T-Aoki]

I don't use SDDM or any other gui based login, but looking at the ports tree for it https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/tree/x11/sddm I don't see any kind of "init" file that could be started by the service command. If there was I would expect to see it in the pkg-plist.
A quick way to check would be "sudo service -l | grep -i sddm" and see if there is anything.
If so, what happens if you do "service sddm start" ?

This should be it.

Usually, *.in files in files directory of any ports are somehow modified on staging and renamed dropping extension .in at the time.

In this specific file, %%PREFIX%% would be replaced with /usr/local by default. And picked by USE_RC_SUBR= sddm line in its port Makefile.

Corresponding part in Mk/bsd.port.mk is here.

 

[mer]

T-Aoki thanks. I missed that. I know about the substitution bits of the makefiles, just been looking at stupid systemd stuff for $WORK brain was looking for something ending in .service.

 

[T-Aoki]

T-Aoki thanks. I missed that. I know about the substitution bits of the makefiles, just been looking at stupid systemd stuff for $WORK brain was looking for something ending in .service.

Thankfully, systemd is NOT in FreeBSD.

But it would be nice if any handy way to set system-wide environment variables to /sbin/init via /boot/loader.conf or alike, but NOT too intruding way like systemd.
Like tunables can be defined in /boot/loader.conf and passed to kernel, pass environment variable to /sbin/init, that kernel first invokes and the (great ... great grand parent throughout mid and leaf processes).