sysutils/desktop-installer is a pretty neat way to quickly install your choice of one of several Desktop Environments on FreeBSD. However, it does have some rough edges.

• When you run it for the first time, if you get the following, it is most likely that your clock is set wrong:

Cloning into '/usr/ports'...
fatal: unable to access 'https://git.FreeBSD.org/ports.git/': SSL certificate problem: certificate is not yet valid

• Some functionality assumes that you are logged in on the system console (i.e. not via ssh or serial). Examples:
  • restarting moused.

• Error handling, in general, needs to be more robust.

• The code commonly assumes that the following are available and return non-empty answers:
  • dmidecode
  • ACPI sysctls
  • pciconf -lv

The above are simply not true for anything other than amd64/i386. MarkLinimon is looking into this.

• Valid operation of sysutils/polkit is assumed. This introduces a dependency on rust, which may or may not be available.

• If the system console is not implemented yet (e.g. on Rock64), desktop-installer is of limited utility.

• development home page
• desktop-installer source on github
• desktop-installer issues on github