New question on Mate and FreeBSD

[James B. Byrne]

On Mon, April 24, 2017 16:45, Polytropon wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Apr 2017 16:10:10 -0400, James B. Byrne via
> freebsd-questions wrote:
>> How does one drop out of slim to the console? I installed FreeBSD-11
>> on a spare laptop and I am having some difficulty logging on through
>> slim.  I have installed mate and slim but when I run slim it prompts
>> for a login and then fails with 'unable to execute login'; or
>> something similar.
>>
>> However when this happens I do not know how to get out of the
>> graphical logon screen without rebooting the system.
>
> Solution A: switch consoles with Ctrl+Alt+PF1 / PF2 / PF3 / ...
>
> Solution B: do A, followed by "killall -9 slim"
>
> This of course doesn't work anymore when you're using sc "as"
> the console driver, so you must use "vt". This _might_ indtroduce
> new problems with character sizes, fonts, and locale support. :-)
>
> Sidenote: In normal text mode, you use Alt+PF1 / PF2 / PF3 / ...
> to switch between the virtual consoles, the "Print / Sys Rq" key
> can be used to iterate through the consoles.
>
>

My usual practice on CentOS is to configure the host to boot into text
mode and then run startx from the console to start the graphical
desktop.  I have installed mate on the FreeBSD system but cannot seem
to hit upon the correct manner to start it.  Well, it sort of starts
but what shows up is not recognisable as desktop.  This is just
ignorance on my part.  I had similar problems when I decided to use
mate instead of gnome when I was testing RHEL/CentOS7.

However, if someone else has already done this then a recipe with the
requisite packages and suitable configuration would not be refused.  I
can live easily without the pretty start up graphical interface if
that is going to cause other issues.

P.S.

Does PF1 == F1 (function key 1) or does this refer to something else?

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James B. Byrne                mailto:ByrneJB at Harte-Lyne.ca
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