A humble request for FreeBSD enthusiasts to install desktop this way

[Manish Jain]

Hi all,

This is not a question. It is a request to folks to try my first port 
sysutils/mkdesktop committed yesterday  *thanks Ultima and Yuri

mkdesktop, a Bourne shell script, needs just that to install a whole 
desktop (X, applications, desktop) and mkdesktop is built for extreme 
convolution, with as much flexibility as possible - something that 
Ultima spotted early on.

By default, you get 5 stages:

pre_x (stuff where you can get console applications - anything beyond sh)

x (usually just gets xorg)

post_x (any X applications that are not DE-specific: firefox; xmms, etc)

desktop (what you define as the DE: wired by default for kde4)

post_desktop (DE specific stuff that the desktop stage itself does not 
get: kolourpaint; ksnapshot; kcalc)

You can add-and-subtract not just from the stage definitions - but the 
number of stages itself. If you wish to get everything in a single 
stage, you can do that too. Or you can use a few million stages.

Each stage is declared in the file ~/mkdesktop/stage-definitions) and 
can be overridden by a stage-specific file under ~/mkdesktop/pkg_list/)

Since the default is wired for kde4, I'll give a short intro to 
customise. Let's say you want fvwm2 (with smplayer and gvim thrown in 
too, just for kicks) as your desktop, use:

mkdesktop   #accept initialisation and then issue the following command 
in a separate terminal :

echo "
fvwm2
smplayer
gvim" > ~/mkdesktop/pkg_list/desktop

I hope it gives ideas for what mkdesktop does. It is particularly 
helpful when setting up multiple systems - just save your 
~/mkdesktop/pkg_list/ files once (if any), apart from the script itself 
and its helper data under /usr/local/share/mkdesktop/ on a USB stick.

Note : Using --begin 0 will even configure graphics for you. By default, 
begin level is 1 and end is 5 (or the highest number computed from 
~/mkdesktop/stage-definitions at runtime)

If any folks try mkdesktop, I shall be thankful. Of course you can 
always ping me with comments and suggestions.


-- 
Thanks & Regards,
Manish Jain