Installing the FreeBSD GUI

Christian Walther cptsalek at gmail.com
Tue Apr 10 12:13:20 UTC 2007


On 10/04/07, Dhananjaya hiremath <om_music06 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>     I am student of MSRIT and doing project in HP. I installede the FreeBSD 6.2 in command mode only.I want that to be in GUI.So how can I do in and one more thing is that how to debug the installation weather all the package and ports are working or not.

There is no such thing as THE FreeBSD GUI. Just like with many other
Open Source Operating Systems you can decide what to use. So,
basically you need an X-Server to get started. This is covered in the
FreeBSD manual in chapter 5:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x11.html

Then you can either install KDE, GNOME or xfce4 as desktop
environments, or a smaller and less resource consuming Window Manager.
Check out /usr/ports/x11-wm.

Concerning packages: There is no simple way to determine wether a port
is running or not. But if you install from ports and the "make
install" finishes with registering the installation of the port and
ends without any error message, the port should have been installed
fine.
The rest is up to you: When a port doesn't do what it is supposed to
do or doesn't work as expected chances are high that you either found
a bug or something is broken.

Before updating either ports or the base system you should read
/usr/src/UPDATING and /usr/ports/UPDATING which contains some
information concerning updates. gettext has been updated in ports,
which resulted in a necessary rebuild for all ports that depended on
it.
Reading this can save you some trouble.
This is covered in chapter 4 in the handbook, btw. ;-)

HTH
Christian


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