Using FreeBSD as Desktop OS

Vull said:
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.
Click to expand...
I have huge respect for KDE. It's my fav opensource desktop.
The trouble is that I'm install FreeBSD on an old Lenovo T420 laptop which has only 8GB of Ram and I felt KDE a bit sluggish after the first install and I partially configured it to my liking.
When I saw this link "https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/03/29/freebsd-desktop-part-1-simplified-boot/" and the guy was using a similar Lenovo machine, with Openbox, made me think about light weight desktops and building one from scratch.
I will have to check the specs properly of the laptop. So far I guess I'm just using whatever resolution that comes as standard with the install.

I'm looking at certain elements of the desktop environment that needs addressing.
how do you get change the preferences for Xterm? I would like black background and white text, but so far I'm only having the white background with black text.
A suitable panel for my liking.
I've tried XFE and Thunar for the file manager. I'm thinking of moving over to Nemo instead. It seems to have everything that I need. Otherwise, I'll just install Dolphin and work with that.
Obmenu gives me an error every time I run it. It says that I'm missing the menu.xml file in the home/user/.config/openbox
So I'm not sure what to do there. If it is missing. How is it that I can still use a menu when I start Openbox to run Xterm? Where is that menu located?
How do we give Openbox the feature of snapping windows side by side as we do in Windows?
 
knightjp said:
I have huge respect for KDE. It's my fav opensource desktop.
The trouble is that I'm install FreeBSD on an old Lenovo T420 laptop which has only 8GB of Ram and I felt KDE a bit sluggish after the first install and I partially configured it to my liking.
When I saw this link "https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/03/29/freebsd-desktop-part-1-simplified-boot/" and the guy was using a similar Lenovo machine, with Openbox, made me think about light weight desktops and building one from scratch.
I will have to check the specs properly of the laptop. So far I guess I'm just using whatever resolution that comes as standard with the install.

I'm looking at certain elements of the desktop environment that needs addressing.
how do you get change the preferences for Xterm? I would like black background and white text, but so far I'm only having the white background with black text.
A suitable panel for my liking.
I've tried XFE and Thunar for the file manager. I'm thinking of moving over to Nemo instead. It seems to have everything that I need. Otherwise, I'll just install Dolphin and work with that.
Obmenu gives me an error every time I run it. It says that I'm missing the menu.xml file in the home/user/.config/openbox
So I'm not sure what to do there. If it is missing. How is it that I can still use a menu when I start Openbox to run Xterm? Where is that menu located?
How do we give Openbox the feature of snapping windows side by side as we do in Windows?
Click to expand...

Interesting. I was using FreeBSD on a Core 2 Duo 1.86 Ghz with 3GB of ram and KDE5 worked surprisingly well. I remember it ran good back in the day when it was version 3.5 or 4 on my Pentium 4, 2.0Ghz with 640MB of ram! Just as a sidenote, you can install KDE without the bloatware by installing the x11/plasma5-plasma meta package.

Xterm and its close cousin Rxvt/URxvt both take their settings from your .Xresources file in your home directory. Look up some configs online. Here's some themes to get you started: https://github.com/AntSunrise/URxvt-themes. I suggested polybar but I haven't used it in a while because I no longer use panels so I can't comment on the choices out there. For a long time I just used dzen and piped some conky stuff into that. PCmanFM is my file manager of choice for GUI. Otherwise I use ranger which is a console file manager. I can't help with the openbox stuff as I havent used that WM in 7 years lol.
 
tedbell said:
Interesting. I was using FreeBSD on a Core 2 Duo 1.86 Ghz with 3GB of ram and KDE5 worked surprisingly well. I remember it ran good back in the day when it was version 3.5 or 4 on my Pentium 4, 2.0Ghz with 640MB of ram! Just as a sidenote, you can install KDE without the bloatware by installing the x11/plasma5-plasma meta package.

Xterm and its close cousin Rxvt/URxvt both take their settings from your .Xresources file in your home directory. Look up some configs online. Here's some themes to get you started: https://github.com/AntSunrise/URxvt-themes. I suggested polybar but I haven't used it in a while because I no longer use panels so I can't comment on the choices out there. For a long time I just used dzen and piped some conky stuff into that. PCmanFM is my file manager of choice for GUI. Otherwise I use ranger which is a console file manager. I can't help with the openbox stuff as I havent used that WM in 7 years lol.
Click to expand...

Does ranger run fast over distant connection?

mc performs relatively quite slow over fuse sshfs.
 
Spartrekus said:
Does ranger run fast over distant connection?

mc performs relatively quite slow over fuse sshfs.
Click to expand...

Not sure. I don't have any servers or any use for ssh at the moment so I wouldn't know. Ranger gets slow when "preview files" is enabled. Give it a try but YMMV.
 
tedbell said:
Not sure. I don't have any servers or any use for ssh at the moment so I wouldn't know. Ranger gets slow when "preview files" is enabled. Give it a try but YMMV.
Click to expand...

This means that it is likely not optimized for ssh.

It depends what comes after opendir(), and what kind of sort method, which is employed. Previews means also to proceed to read the file - and it can do lot of stuffs to get the prev.
 
Spartrekus said:
This means that it is likely not optimized for ssh.

It depends what comes after opendir(), and what kind of sort method, which is employed. Previews means also to proceed to read the file - and it can do lot of stuffs to get the prev.
Click to expand...

Yeah. Ranger frequently hangs when previewing large files like archives. Photo previews are done through w3m-img.
 
After my installation going pretty smoothly, after doing a reboot, I got this.
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How do I fix this?
 
[QUOTE="tedbell, post: 420944, member: 5622
What window manager/desktop environment did you install?
[/QUOTE]
pkg install xorg openbox xdm obconf obmenu nitrogen wifimgr
 
knightjp said:
[QUOTE="tedbell, post: 420944, member: 5622
What window manager/desktop environment did you install?
Click to expand...
pkg install xorg openbox xdm obconf obmenu nitrogen wifimgr
[/QUOTE]

Hmmm looks like something is the matter with your display manager. Try disabling it and launching openbox with xinit.
 
knightjp said:
I have huge respect for KDE. It's my fav opensource desktop.The trouble is that I'm install FreeBSD on an old Lenovo T420 laptop which has only 8GB of Ram and I felt KDE a bit sluggish after the first install and I partially configured it to my liking.
When I saw this link "https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/03/29/freebsd-desktop-part-1-simplified-boot/" and the guy was using a similar Lenovo machine, with Openbox, made me think about light weight desktops and building one from scratch.
Click to expand...

I have a great deal of respect for many things, software not among them. Confidence and satisfaction are what I take into consideration when thinking of software. I'm more interested in if it works like it should and the way I want it to. Good or bad.

I have no respect whatsoever for x11-wm/fluxbox but am confident it will work the way I want it to and satisfied that it does. It's what I use on all my machines.

Here's a screenshot of my FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE-p9 Thinkpad T400 with Intel Core2 Duo P8600 @ 2.4GHz, 8GB RAM and 200GB Scorpio Black HDD @ 7200RPM using x11-wm/fluxbox as a WM, x11-fm/xfe for a file manager, x11/rxvt-unicode as a terminal, sysutils/gkrellm2 for system info and multimedia/xmms for tunes:

6245

I use an ~/.Xdefaults for terminal transparency and font style. It has 1280x800 resolution which doesn't leave a lot of screen space but the machine I use most out of several even though it is not the most powerful. I have a W520 with Intel Core i7-2760QM @ 2.4GHz, 8GB RAM, 500GB Hitachi Travelstar HDD @ 7200RPM and 1920x1080 resolution sitting to my left but prefer to use this.

Works for me and it can you, too. And still respect you in the morning.
 
Trihexagonal when talking about respect, I was mostly referring to the work done by the developers. :)
Despite the awful KDE4 (just my opinion; I know there are those who like it), the KDE development has really improved.
I liked KDE for its immense customization and number of features. I would use KDE, but I feel that KDE comes rather bundled with a whole load of software that I don't even use like kmail, Konqueror, kwrite, etc. They take up quite a bit of space and for the most part, I will be using other programs on my system or that's where openbox seem like a good idea.

However now having spent some time with openbox, I'm finding it hard to get it looking and themed the way I want. I'm quite new with it.

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This is what it looks like now.
I would like to get a dark mode theme on openbox and I’m currently using xfce4-panel. But I’m trying to find a way to have the background of the panel black with white text.
I also would like to have xterm in a similar way with black background and white text.

I’m guessing I would need to be editing a lot of text files.

I did a couple of changes. I’m using tint2 as a panel.

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I would like to know how to edit xterm.
 
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I've tried using Slim and SDDM for the display manager with Openbox. Doesn't seem to work.
Slim just refused to login at all... Sddm refused to start, even though I made all the correct settings in
Code: 
/etc/rc.conf
I'm currently using xdm and I like it. But I would like to know how to get something more modern looking.
I wish that xenodm from OpenBSD was available. It looks really good.
 
knightjp said:
I'm currently using xdm and I like it. But I would like to know how to get something more modern looking.
I wish that xenodm from OpenBSD was available. It looks really good.
Click to expand...
I dont use a DM on FreeBSD, only xinit(1) to start the X server. But if I am not mistaken, I think you can change the look of x11/xdm the way you like although it is limited. The background and geometry settings are stored in /usr/local/etc/X11/xdm/Xsetup_0 and the rest of modification is kept in /usr/local/etc/X11/xdm/Xresources.
 
knightjp said:
I'm currently using xdm and I like it. But I would like to know how to get something more modern looking.
I wish that xenodm from OpenBSD was available. It looks really good.
Click to expand...
I don't understand why you don't use x11/lightdm; has a modern look can be easy customized, etc. As for xterm "edit" although the correct word is config, you need to add or config .Xresources.
 
Minbari said:
I don't understand why you don't use x11/lightdm; has a modern look can be easy customized, etc. As for xterm "edit" although the correct word is config, you need to add or config .Xresources.
Click to expand...
To be fair, I came across lightdm already.. I followed the instruction on this thread. https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/lightdm.59101/
I added the "lightdm_enable="YES" to the /etc/rc.conf file. I didn't work. Just came across the console. Maybe I need to edit the /etc/ttys?
I tried Sddm the same way... it didn't work. Slim worked but wouldn't let me in.. I had to go back to the console to log into the machine.
xdm is the only one that works reliably I would say. It just looks really dated compared to the Openbox setup.
 
Since we are on the subject of display managers: don't display managers run as root since they are invoked using /etc/rc.conf? No idea if there are any security implications to that. I always boot to a command line and run startx. I feel boxed in when I run a display manager for some reason. That's just me, everyone has their own way of doing this.
 
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