I installed from the mini image with no desktop (USB installation). Here, I am sharing the steps needed to successfully setup Wayland, and Sway in particular, but many of the steps are required for general Wayland use. It's not at all difficult to have a Wayland window manager running, but without knowing a few key steps, one can become frustrated:
Wayland/Windowing General
I highlighted "pkg install noto-basic" because I had started running sway and was having problems with text not being displayed (just empty square boxes where characters would be) and terminals not running (neither alacritty nor foot). Once I installed the font(s) (noto-basic), the desktop environment worked fine.
Not also, that I highlighted the location of the default sway config file: /usr/local/etc/sway/config This is because on FreeBSD (I'm using FreeBSD 15), the default sway config file is not in the typical location (/etc/sway/config). (This is good though, because as we know, FreeBSD has good separation of system and userland.) Also, it's important to comment out anything in the config file that runs sway utilities (e.g. swaybg, swayidle, ...) if they are not installed.
sway offers a few other utilities in addition to those listed in preferences.
Trivia: Why is foot terminal emulator called "foot"? The author states that it's called "foo", so it's foo terminal, thus "foot". (Apparently couldn't think of a name
).
Hope helpful, and very excited to be running the full release of FreeBSD 15. I very much like the professionalism of FreeBSD and it's reflected in the OS itself and the simplicity of configuration steps. Configuration steps are needed sometimes, but they appear needed only because they are for a user-specific interest that is not an appropriate default assumption of the OS, and the simplicity of the steps themselves reflects thoughtful design IMHO.
Wayland/Windowing General
- pkg install drm-kmod
- sysrc kld_list+=i915kms
- pkg install seatd
- In /etc/rc.conf: seatd_enable="YES"
- service seatd start (or reboot)
- pkg install wayland xwayland
- pkg install noto-basic (important)
- pkg install sway
- pkg install alacritty or pkg install foot
- pkg install swaybg
- pkg install swayidle
- pkg install swaylock
- Copy the default sway config file from /usr/local/etc/sway/config to ~/.config/sway/ and edit as needed.
I highlighted "pkg install noto-basic" because I had started running sway and was having problems with text not being displayed (just empty square boxes where characters would be) and terminals not running (neither alacritty nor foot). Once I installed the font(s) (noto-basic), the desktop environment worked fine.
Not also, that I highlighted the location of the default sway config file: /usr/local/etc/sway/config This is because on FreeBSD (I'm using FreeBSD 15), the default sway config file is not in the typical location (/etc/sway/config). (This is good though, because as we know, FreeBSD has good separation of system and userland.) Also, it's important to comment out anything in the config file that runs sway utilities (e.g. swaybg, swayidle, ...) if they are not installed.
sway offers a few other utilities in addition to those listed in preferences.
Trivia: Why is foot terminal emulator called "foot"? The author states that it's called "foo", so it's foo terminal, thus "foot". (Apparently couldn't think of a name
).Hope helpful, and very excited to be running the full release of FreeBSD 15. I very much like the professionalism of FreeBSD and it's reflected in the OS itself and the simplicity of configuration steps. Configuration steps are needed sometimes, but they appear needed only because they are for a user-specific interest that is not an appropriate default assumption of the OS, and the simplicity of the steps themselves reflects thoughtful design IMHO.
