Helping to put FreeBSD GNOME onto more desktops

Kris Moore kris at pcbsd.com
Tue Jun 10 11:50:07 UTC 2008


Joe Marcus Clarke wrote:
> Sam Fourman Jr. wrote:
>> I am all for the Idea of considering PC-BSD FreeBSD's Officially 
>> supported Desktop.
>>
>> I assume that is what we are aiming for here. one thing I am a little 
>> confused about though.
> 
> We're aiming for giving PC-BSD users a choice of desktop (at least 
> that's what my PBI aims to do).  We're not trying to change PC-BSD, just 
> leverage what they have already created for people who would like a 
> GNOME desktop.
>

This is something that I've been asked about a fair amount. Lots of 
people love PC-BSD, but want to be able to run Gnome on it before 
they'll commit. (And most of them don't want to compile themselves). By 
having a PBI available of Gnome, we can now offer BSD desktops to a 
different segment of the community which are Gnome enthusiasts.

One thing I mentioned to Joe is possibly with the next version of PC-BSD 
later this summer, we could offer the Gnome PBI on our ISO / CDs, that 
way during the install a user could choose "Gnome" to have it available 
right at first boot. This may help further satisfy a need in the 
community, where a user could have a Gnome desktop setup in just a few 
minutes.


>>
>> Kris more mentioned to me once that, one of the reasons why 
>> portupgrade -ar would not work well on PC-BSD is because,  hal was 
>> patched. I am not sure of the details. but could we pull this patch 
>> back into FreeBSD , so that portupgrade -ar would not mess up PC-BSD?
> 
> PC-BSD uses the ports collection at this point.  The patch to which he 
> referred was pulled into the official hal port.
> 

Correct, once that patch was pulled into HAL then PC-BSD became just 
regular ports again, nothing stopping you from modifying to your hearts 
content.


-- 

Kris Moore
PC-BSD Software
http://www.pcbsd.com


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