Hi There,


I am testing FreeBSD, I tried to set up Cinnamon desktop but there is no such thing a ready made ‘distro’ for FreeBSD so I brew one myself. It should be easy by installing the Cinnamon Desktop package and enable GDM, I successfully setup Gnome desktop but hit the wall in Cinnamon. As far as I understand I need to add few lines :


In fstab :


proc    /procfs        rw    0    0


In rc.conf


gdm_enable=”YES”

dbus_enable=”YES”

hald_enable=”YES”


I’m not sure it I need to add :


gnome_enable=”YES”


I can’t find any info on that part, since Cinnamon is actually Gnome so I did that but didn’t work, I even enable cinnamon but no use :


cinnamon_enable=”YES”


After messing around a bit I got the BSD screen of dead the first time, I want Cinnamon because I am used to it on Linux, and it came with some useful utilities, any comment ? 

Attached Thumbnails

 

That error in your attached image is generated by gnome.

Follow the instructions here: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/x11-wm.html

1 members found this post helpful.

But I want to start Cinnamon is there other any setting ?

Then adapt the information from that article to your situation.

Have a look in /usr/local/etc/rc.d

That's where rc scripts installed from ports are located.

If there is no "cinnamon" service installed there, then adding a "cinnamon_enable" stanza to rc.conf might not achieve anything.

I believe "gnome_enable", however loads all the needed gnome services, so you should only need that - and by that logic "cinnamon_enable" may also work...

Or you can start gdm hald and dbus and the two avahi services individually and that should also do the trick and gdm should start automatically. You should then be able to start the desktop of your choice.

So cinnamon is currently DEAD on FreeBSD due to a deprecated python issue. https://www.freshports.org/search.ph...aseinsensitive

The port shows as deprecated so I would give up if I were you and move to Gnome (shudder) or something else. Sorry, but FreeBSD desktop ports don't get as much love as Linux desktops do. Most FreeBSD desktop users use window managers only. Not to say you can't use a DE but if you hang out on the FreeBSD Forums, most of the long time users are using Fluxbox, FVWM, CWM, etc. Linux converts try to use Gnome, KDE, etc, and they are ported, but can be problematic.

1 members found this post helpful.

I do not know about display managers, but almost no tinkering is necessary to get a window manager working using the startx command. Just copy .xinitrc from /usr/local/etc/X11 to /home and add exec name_of_WM. To get i3 working I also had to add dbus_enable="YES" to /etc/rc.conf.

Be aware though one or more pieces may not be included and need to be installed separately. An example is i3. For some reason I do not understand FreeBSD's i3 package does not include dmenu.

Oh that sucks, Cinnamon is my favorite desktop on Linux, yes the very few complete FreeBSD 'distro' came with Openbox and Mate only, I want Cinnamon because I've youtube playback problem in Openbox that the video pauses every 10sec., no such problem with Linux on the same machine so I want to try other desktop.

I finally gave up on Cinnamon and used Gnome and it worked, now I got a basic Gnome desktop when boot up, but both my Firefox and Thunderbird stopped working with error :

"Your Firefox/Thunderbird profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible"

I removed both also removed the hidden profile folder and reinstall but still the same error, I am posting this with Chrome. I tested again Youtube and there is no pausing in the video, or too brief I can't see, so the problem basically fixed and it was OpenBox to blame but only on FreeBSD, Linux seems to be more reliable and fast on the same machine. Since the system pretty messed up after the changes, I will reinstall from ground up and add Gnome to see what comes.

The GUI being used will make no difference unless the port is missing something. My guess is FreeBSD's Gnome port has a dependency related to video that they do not include in their Openbox. If you feel like going through the effort you can test that theory. Since Gnome is installed, you could install Openbox, run it and see if video play is improved. If so the relative dependency could be tracked down.

One of the reasons I do not use FreeBSD is I find it a little flaky. In addition to the slightly annoying missing dependencies I mentioned in my previous post, some of FreeBSD's packages cannot be run, because they are missing dependencies that are no longer maintained and have been removed from the repository. Which is the message produced when attempting to launch those applications with a terminal.

Sorry but this is nonsense.
I'm sure video playback issues on *BSD can be solved regardless of Desktop used.

1 members found this post helpful.

True.

The solution in this case may be to use the browser that works.

Firefox is developed for Linux, Windows, macOS and mobile versions for iOS and Android. There are no FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD official Firefox builds.

So bringing Firefox to these platforms is a software porting effort. Usually ports release with documentation, which explains the limitations, caveats, etc.

I have no interest in playing videos, but I often see advice on the FreeBSD forums and mailing lists for FreeBSD and OpenBSD to the effect that "youtube-dl" is preferred or that chromium is preferred.

FreeBSD has updated Gnome-3 to Gnome-3.38 (most of the packages). I am using FreeBSD-12.1 with Gnome and it works great.

I have a FreeBSD 12.1-release box with KDE plasma 5 + sddm - no real problems, that I can see, but as ever setting up X, with direct rendering on FreeBSD is always a bit more manual that it is on other systems.