Newbie and Xfce ... things wrong in documentation?

W

wonko42

Hi there,

As a Linux user I'm interested in FreeBSD and so I installed it in Virtualbox. Of course I'd like to get a nice Xfce4 desktop, so I tried out the steps from the Handbook on this site:

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x11-wm.html

Well, it did NOT work, because (I guess) a few things are missing.

First I installed Xorg , Xfce and Slim.

The handbook did NOT tell everything about how to configure /etc/rc.conf. The following entries are needed:

Code: 
moused_enable="YES"
dbus_enable="YES"
hald_enable="YES"
slim_enable="YES"

Why is this missing in the chapter about Xfce? Is there anything I have misunderstood?

To make a long story short: I heard about the great quality of the FreeBSD Documentation, and now there are such important pieces of information missing?

Best,
wonko42
 
Couple of things.

Most of the good documentation you hear about is for the man and info pages, and the Handboook and other docs related to FreeBSD. The Handbook is about FreeBSD. xfce is a third party application and covered by less than half a page in the Handbook so that shouldn't be your sole source for how to run xfce but I'm surprised it didn't work out of the box. Did you use ports or packages?

The first three items are covered earlier in the Handbook for setting FreeBSD up without regard to xfce or any other desktop environment. I don't know what slim is. If you skipped the earlier chapters, you won't read anything about them and that's why they're a surprise to you.
 
Like other things, FreeBSD's documentation has suffered due to lack of manpower. The handbook may be out of date and even things like UPDATING are no longer as useful as they were. When things like the overyonder page were written, in the mid double oughts, FreeBSD docs were much better, IMHO, than the Linux ones, especially many of the man pages, but these days, the Linux man pages have greatly improved.

Keep in mind that there are probably hundreds of window managers and it would be unrealistic for the handbook to cover each one. I find that installing xorg-server, xf86-input-mouse, xf86-input-keyboard, and a video driver are usually sufficient. Then, I install a window manager like dwm or openbox, boot into text mode and startx, and all is good. I add dbus--have no need to add moused or hald, so these may be idiosyncrasies of your hardware.

Actually, I don't think you _need_ dbus, but I use it for certain programs, and so I enable it.


Did you look at this?
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/x-install.html

That covers installing X, though not sure if it would cover slim--@drhowardfine, slim is a GUI login manager.

I think that the official docs are up to date with FreeBSD as a VirtualBox guest and might also be useful.

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/virtualization-guest-virtualbox.html

(But not tested by me, when I install it in VirtualBox it's usually to test something, and I don't install X.)

Anyway, in summary, much of the handbook can be out of date and as the good doctor mentions, especially when dealing with 3rd party apps, and X is actually a 3rd party app. :)

I can't be much help, as I don't use xfce or a GUI log in manager. But this is a VirtualBox guest and you don't mention if you've done the necessary guest addons.
 
moused is not for X, it's for console, see moused(8).
However, it may be needed for certain types of hardware, e.g. ThinkPad touchpad.
I see no reason to enable it if you run FreeBSD in VirtualBox, since it doesn't see your real hardware.
 
wonko42 said:
The handbook did NOT tell everything about how to configure /etc/rc.conf.
Click to expand...
Actually it does.

Although the above comments are absolutely true, the Handbook is outdated here and there, it's also fair to say that the handbook doesn't actually provide full hand holding on how to perform certain tasks but rather explains how the underlying mechanics work.

What I mean by that: although the section on how to set up XFCE4 may not include mention of all the required services (though... the section about Gnome does) the handbook does explain how to manage services on FreeBSD in general (see the link I shared above). So all that's left to do is to connect the dots and set up the right services.

For example... x11-wm/xfce4-panel depends on devel/dbus which sheds a little more light on this. And then there's also what the others already said above.

The handbook doesn't provide full details, but it does contain everything you need to know to make this work.

wonko42 said:
The following entries are needed:

Code: 
moused_enable="YES"
dbus_enable="YES"
hald_enable="YES"
slim_enable="YES"
Click to expand...
I run XFCE4 on my laptop and well...

Code: 
feliner:/home/peter $ tail /etc/rc.conf

## Local services

dbus_enable="YES"
hald_enable="YES"
samba_server_enable="YES"
bsdstats_enable="YES"
avahi_daemon_enable="YES"
avahi_dnsconfd_enable="YES"
You can ignore Samba and BSDStats (though the latter would help the cause I suppose) but this is all you really need to use XFCE4. Avahi is used by the network manager by the way, and it helps to show networked computers.

wonko42 said:
To make a long story short: I heard about the great quality of the FreeBSD Documentation, and now there are such important pieces of information missing?
Click to expand...
There's nothing missing. All you need is in the handbook, but as said, you need to connect the dots.
 
Slim is a separate matter from xfce. As are other login managers like gdm. I see people fighting with them, and kind of recall fighting with Slim myself at some point. Now I use startx, which really just runs startxfce4 --with-ck-launch.
 
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