Yippeee .... success ... So I finally managed to install a desktop for my freebsd. I had been trying to install and use freebsd for years now ... but each time the shell prompt put me off and I never really had the patience to stick around. This time ... hung on and did not give up. Also this time round I was more interested in virtualization tools; and the ease and safe manner it made installing multiple OS without messing up the drive partitions. So for my lessons learnt, I learnt that QEMU/KVM path is not great for testing out FreeBSD/Desktop. I wasted nearly 10 days trying out various configs. Installing FreeBSD is easy but QEMU does display not the desktop. Apparently QEMU has issues with its emulation of the graphics card on intel hd620 kabylake. So the problem may be specific to the hardware on my laptop. I like QEMU because of the ease with which one can run an OS image with just a command line. I made a switch to virtualbox and ran the FreeBSD installation with KDE5 plasma desktop. I was successful with this but it took me nearly 5 attempts before I was successful. And on each failure, I learnt something new. As follows:
- Install freebsd on your virtual drive following all the std procedures. Keep in mind while creating users pls be sure to add the user to wheel and operator groups If you miss this step you can always come back to the shell as root and add user to wheel and operator with command. So
$pw group mod {groupNameHere} -m {userNameHere}
for eg if solaris was your userid (just for for fun ..
).
$pw group mod wheel -m solaris
Once you log into your freebsd shell as root user. Pls run following commands and install a few tools.
$pkg upgrade
$pkg update -f
$portsnap fetch extract
$portsnap update
or
$portsnap auto
$pkg install sudo
run the visudo command and add the user to sudoer.
$visudo
If solaris was the user add the following line.
solaris ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
or
solaris ALL=(ALL) ALL
save the file and exit back to shell prompt.
Run the following commands to begin the installation of KDE5 plasma desktop.
$pkg install nano vim
$pkg install xorg
$pkg install kde5
$pkg install sddm
$pkg install virtualbox-ose-additions
Edit /etc/rc.conf and add the following entries
##### Desktop KDE5 setting
dbus_enable="YES"
sddm_enable="YES"
devd_enable="YES"
##### These are virtualbox guest additions features
vboxguest_enable="YES"
vboxservice_enable="YES"
Edit /etc/sysctl.conf file and add the following entries
######### Settings for a KDE tool, probably gstreamer
##########################################
net.local.stream.recvspace=65536
net.local.stream.sendspace=65536
###########################################
kern.ipc.shm_allow_removed=1
###########################################
kern.maxfiles=1000000
##########################################
You may also add the following line to /etc/fstab for mount the proc device to /proc.
proc /proc procfs rw 0 0
save the settings and quit.
$reboot.
Hopefully you will see your KDE5 plasma desktop up and runining on freebsd. Gnome and other desktop installations are quite similar and may differ in the display managers used. All the best ...