large pkg installs - experience

[Anton Shterenlikht]

Last week I needed to prepare 3 FreeBSD boxes for UG students.
Since there were not for me, I wanted to have as painless
experence as possible. All boxes are amd64. So I chose 10-release.
I wanted to try gnome on one box, xfce on the second, and kde
on the third, i.e. the 3 environments described in the handbook.
Here is my experience.

1. Gnome is the clear winner - exactly as in the manual, and
all packages available form the default repo.

2. Xfce install required some tweaking, I think not all
packages were available from the default repo. In addition,
I had to amend .xsession mentioned in the manual:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x11-wm.html
echo "exec /usr/local/bin/startxfce4" >> ~/.xsession

to this:

if [ -z "$DESKTOP_SESSION" -a -x /usr/bin/ck-launch-session ]; then
    exec ck-launch-session dbus-launch /usr/local/bin/startxfce4
else
    exec dbus-launch /usr/local/bin/startxfce4
fi


3. KDE was in third place, i.e. last - I could not install it at all.
The stumbling block was libGLU, which didn't want to
install unless I set WITH_NEW_XORG. Does this mean
that KDE is available only for new Xorg? I tried to
set this in make.conf, but got errors on X -configure and
freezes while trying to run X. When I have time, I might
give in another go and send a PR.

Finally, the issue of coexisting texlive and tetex seems to be still unresolved:

pkg: WARNING: locally installed tex-kpathsea-6.1.0_2 conflicts on /usr/local/share/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf with:
        - teTeX-base-3.0_25.

or am I missing some make setting?

Anton