X: Choose Your Desktop

Quickly and efficiently stand up X Windows with a working window manager or full desktop environment on FreeBSD.

• cure the bland wiki page with …
  • color
  • screen shots

Commands to be run as 'root' will be prefixed with a pound sign or hash.

# whoami
root

Commands to be run as an ordinary user will be prefixed with a dollar sign.

$ whoami
ordinary

This will help make clear to you the required privilege level needed for each command. This page does not assume 'sudo' or 'doas' has been enabled so it uses 'su -' to show how and when to switch to 'root'. In the commands given below, the user name 'ordinary' is given to represent the login you intend to use for normal daily work. Substitute your own user name when following these instructions. In summary, the two usernames you will see are 'root' and 'ordinary'.

The instructions below assume a tier one architecture, some RAM (2GB+) and free disk space with a fresh install of 12.1-RELEASE. As this is a fresh install, you should update the base install and reboot at least once.

$ su -
(enter root password)
# freebsd-update fetch
# freebsd-update install
# reboot

After reboot and login, you can verify your kernel with these commands:

$ freebsd-version
$ uname -a

If you want a DE or WM with all the bells and whistles, use desktop-installer. It's very thorough. If you want a full DE experience without much effort, this is the way to go.

More details here:

desktop-installer

<<screenshot»

Joe's Window Manager is one of the lightest WMs I've seen. Instructions on how to set it up:

JWM

<<screenshot»

These instructions will install lumina.

$ su -
(enter root password)
# pkg install xorg lumina
# pw groupmod video -m ordinary
# pw groupmod wheel -m ordinary
# pwd_mkdb -p /etc/master.passwd
(drop out of root)
# exit
$ start-lumina-desktop

Of all the X environments described - Lumina was the simplest and fastest to install.

More information here: Lumina

Oh but wait! Technically you have a working X environment but there's no acceleration. Let's fix that now. Exit your X session (select “Leave” from the Lumina menus) and then skip ahead to Acceleration.

After you've set up your WM or DE, take advantage of your machine's built-in GPU acceleration.

Acceleration