Setting up a minimal KDE

[Ernie Luzar]

Manish Jain wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, Apr 11, 2017 at 11:20 PM, Ernie Luzar <luzar722 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Manish Jain wrote:
>>
>>     Hi, On my tertiary box, I was facing multiple problems with
>>     FreeBSD 11 Release. Rather than fix each one, I decided to try a
>>     new, daring approach - a minimal KDE atop FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT
>>     r316508. Comments, suggestions, tips and experimentation requests
>>     are open to this venture. I installed FreeBSD CURRENT and then
>>     installed kde via 'pkg install kde'. After kde installation was
>>     over, I realized that I was running against my original aspiration
>>     of a minimal KDE. So I did the following to remove KDE : pkg
>>     delete -R kde pkg autoremove Then I installed lightweight KDE
>>     using : pkg install kde-baseapps kde-workspace kde-runtime The
>>     above setup has the following components built-in : konsole, kate,
>>     kdm. It was missing okular, k3b and kolourpaint, but these easily
>>     be installed via pkg. I now have a fully functional KDE and a box
>>     that, despite being CURRENT, works well. There are glitches,
>>     however. If anyone has tips to help resolve the glitches, it shall
>>     lead to the perfect KDE setup : 1) This is the more serious
>>     glitch. Taskbar icons in the KDE panel, for some reason I cannot
>>     guess why, are rendered horribly. Fonts everywhere else are pretty
>>     much the same as before, but iconified taskbar fonts in the panel
>>     are very, very ugly. 2) Because my network interface is statically
>>     configured, I want to turn off dhclient entirely, so that it does
>>     not work on each reboot automatically. DHCPDISCOVER packets cost
>>     me about a minute on system start-up. I have tried putting the
>>     following in /etc/rc.conf, but this does not seem to have any
>>     effect : 'dhcpd_enabled=NO"'. 3) I can't figure out how to remove
>>     nepomuk-core. 'pkg delete nepomuk-core' says it would also lead to
>>     removal of kde-baseapps, which would obviously be a very bad idea.
>>     Thanks for any help. If anyone has experimentation requests with
>>     FreeBSD CURRENT and/or KDE, please feel free to ping me. 
>>
>> Can't help you with items 1 & 3, but item 2 is an easy one to fix. In 
>> your rc.conf file you must have a statement something this; 
>> ifconfig_rl0="DHCP" where rl0 is the interface facing the public 
>> internet. Remove it or comment it out
> 
> 
> Hi Ernie,
> 
> I figured out the underlying problem, which must rank as one of the 
> cleverer things I have done in my life (of which there are not very 
> many, quite happily). The Desktop Theme I was previously using after the 
> full KDE install had been customized to use the Slim Glow theme. When I 
> did 'pkg delete kde' and 'pkg autoremove', it produced the pristine 
> KDE-less environment with just xorg.
> 
> Before setting up the minimal KDE, I had to change the Desktop Theme 
> back to the original Oxygen theme which works with the base KDE 
> packages. Leaving the Slim Glow setting was messing up the hidden KDE 
> configuration. Luckily, the system settings applet is available to set 
> things things right again.
> 
> 
> As for the DHCP problem that remains outstanding, this is what my 
> rc.conf has :
> 
> ifconfig_re0="inet 192.168.1.94 netmask 255.255.255.0"
> defaultrouter="192.168.1.1"
> 
> That rc clearly states that I need a static configuration. But dhclient 
> still runs at system startup, losing me over a minute each time.
> 
> Regards
> Manish Jain

What makes you think dhclient is running at boot time?

You previously stated "Because my network interface is statically
configured." What that means is your isp issued you an static ip address 
that you purchased and as such there is no auto host configuration offered.

I would guess that what you are experiencing is a dns timeout during the 
boot process. When you are issued a static ip address from your isp 
there is more manual configuration needed than just what you did in 
rc.conf. You also have to manually configure the /etc/resolv.conf file 
with the isp's two dns ip addresses. Did you do that?

Also 192.168.x.x is reserved for private LAN use. That ip address is not 
routeable over the public internet and was never issued by your isp as a 
static ip address. I hope you just used that for the post to not expose 
your real static ip address other wise you have bigger problems that 
what you have posted.