Why is FreeBSD+GNOME not working on my Pentium laptop ?

[Polytropon]

On Sat, 30 Apr 2016 04:26:47 +0530, Manish Jain wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I have a 5 year old Intel x86 Pentium-based laptop (Gateway NE56R). I 
> just finished installing FreeBSD 10.3 (i386) with Gnome on it. I was 
> expecting everything to go smoothly but the Gnome desktop is proving to 
> be a disaster.

This also was my first impression when installing Gnome 2 ("classic
Gnome desktop") on a Dell D630 laptop running FreeBSD i386 10.2 (started
with 10.0). There was some work to do, things to update and to install,
scripts to abuse, crazy things to do... but after that, everything
worked as intended. Sadly I didn't take notes on what I did, but I can
assure you that most of it was not obvious, logical, or acceptable. :-/

How did you install Gnome? Ports or packages? Which version?



> Most of the desktop is trash, half the application icons 
> are missing and there are no panels.

You probably are missing some important dependency packages.



> Even keyboard input typed into 
> gnome-terminal is not displayed correctly (some of the characters in the 
> echo go missing).

That _really_ sounds strange.



> All necessary entries (hald_enable, polkitd_enable, 
> dbus_enable, gnome_enable) are set to YES in rc.conf. I wonder what is 
> wrong ?

Using Gnome is wrong. ;-)



> Is there any way I can get FreeBSD and Gnome working on the laptop ? 

Reconsider using Gnome. Check if Lxde or Xfce will work better for you.




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...