I've installed FreeBSD 9.1 in a VirtualBox VM, and did some basic setup.
After that, I had installed Gnome2 via sudo pkg_add -r gnome2
.
Along the way, there were some errors. Mostly it was (I think) the package manager complaining about dependencies. They were piling up faster then they were getting resolved (sometimes a package that was reported as a broken dependency would get installed), and when there was around a dozen of them, the installation had stopped without any errors.
I had simply executed the command again, waited for 20 more minutes, and then got greeted with an "installation successful" message.
I restarted the system only to end up with GDM not starting and a regular text prompt ready.
In trying to solve this I had:
- added
gnome_enable="YES"
to/etc/rc.conf
(Why wasn't it there by default?) - added
proc /proc procfs rw 0 0
to/etc/fstab
(I'm not even sure how this is related, but it was supposed to help… I suppose Gnome2 checks fstab for something.)
But I still have no luck, and GDM still doesn't show itself.
However, RC (rc.conf
, or whatever is executing it) does report that it is starting GDM:
When I tried to execute /usr/local/etc/rc.d/gdm start
, it displayed this error message and supposedly failed:
What should I do to start a Gnome2 graphical session in FreeBSD? How can I check whether I have everything I need installed and configured correctly?
Best Answer
I have fixed the issue.
Immediately after typing out that question, I thought it might be an X problem - and it seems that it was.
The problem was that
xorg
apparently hadn't been installed.I ran
sudo pkg_add -r xorg
, and now each time I boot, Gnome2 is started and everything seems to work.However, I still don't understand why "working" isn't the default behavior!