Second attempt at FreeBSD-11.0-RELEASE-i386, Xorg, and Xfce graphical desktop

[Polytropon]

On Tue, 17 Jan 2017 13:03:26 -0800, David Christensen wrote:
> Where can I find information for setting up a GPG agent for XFCE on 
> FreeBSD 11.0?

Probably you'll find that in the Xfce documentation (which
might be primarily targeted at Linux, but you can "translate"
the stuff anyway).



> I don't see instructions in the FreeBSD manual for installing Lumina.

It shouldn't be more complicated than "pkg install lumina"
and looking for a possible post-install message text. I've
been trying this on FreeBSD 10 a few months ago, and all
you need to to is install the package and then add the line
to start Lumina to ~/.xinitrc or ~/.xsession (depending on
your use of a display manager).




> I don't see instructions in the FreeBSD manual for configuring XDM to 
> choose between multiple desktop environments.  (But, I do see a link to 
> the xdm(1) man page and STFW I see a few pages with XDM on FreeBSD 10.)

This is because XDM cannot choose between multiple desktop
environments. :-)

If you're searching for a _simple_ display manager which can
do this, check out wdm, the WindowMaker display manager. It
has a built-in dialog to choose "which .xsession" to execute,
and simply add .xsession files for all the desktops you want
to be able to select from - if I remember correctly, it is
more than 10 years ago that I tried that.



> Where can I find information for:
> 
> 1.  Installing Lumina on FreeBSD 11.0?

Just install it, that should be sufficient.



> 2.  Installing a desktop manager (xdm, lightdm, whatever) on FreeBSD 
> 11.0 and configuring it to work with multiple desktop environments?

Check the documentation of whatever you installed. All this is not
part of FreeBSD itself. Basically, there are two ways to do it:

The "old way" (or "xdm way"): activate xdm in /etc/ttys:

	ttyv8  "/usr/local/bin/xdm -nodaemon"  xterm  on  secure

Change "off" to "on".

The "new way" (or "standard way"): add to /etc/rc.conf

	hald_enable="YES"
	dbus_enable="YES"
	polkitd_enable="YES"
	gnome_enable="YES"

This is, for example, to activate gdm, the Gnome Display Manager.
For KDE, the approach is similar. But as far as I know, gdm does
not let you choose the desktop environment (it enforces Gnome),
and it also doesn't even care for ~/.xsession. However, this stuff
can easily be found in the FreeBSD Gnome project documentation.



For reference:

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/x11-wm.html

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/x-xdm.html

https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?manpath=xfree86&query=xdm

https://www.freebsd.org/gnome/

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Gnome

https://wiki.freebsd.org/KDE

https://wiki.lxde.org/en/FreeBSD

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/58140/



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...