Fresh Installation Of FreeBSD 11.2--Mate Not Working Properly

B J va6bmj at gmail.com
Tue Dec 4 18:35:55 UTC 2018


<snip>

> Isn't that scary? All those messages are usually hidden.
> You can even get more shocked when you build from source,
> then you'll see tons of warnings... terrible attitude...
> Part of the error messages aren't even helpful, like the
> inability to "find provider ' '" - that's really great!
> It seems the times of usable and bloat-reduced software
> is long gone... :-/

It reminds me of when, during my sophomore undergrad year, I first
learned programming with WATFOR/WATFIV.  It often produced a lot of
cryptic error messages which I, a rookie at this, often couldn't
figure out.  Worse was that we did it in those days with punch cards
because interactive terminal weren't, for the most part, available on
campus.

>
>
>
>> Then there were some messages regarding the location of
>> GNOME_KEYRING_CONTROL and SSH_AUTH_SOCK, followed by:
>>
>> Connection failure: Connection refused
>> pa_context_connect() failed:  Connection refused
>
> Check in /etc/rc.conf for the presence of the following settings,
> which I found from a reference MATE system (which uses slim instead
> of gdm, as Gnome was removed due to the Gnome 2 -> Gnome 3
> trouble):
>
> 	hald_enable="YES"
> 	dbus_enable="YES"
> 	polkitd_enable="YES"
> 	volmand_enable="YES"
> 	slim_enable="YES"
>
> That last line refers to slim, a display manager (GUI login).
> Anyway, make sure HAL (deprecated), DBus (obsoleted), PolKit
> (nonsense) are actually installed on your system.

I used

hald_enable='YES'
dbus_enable='YES'

in /etc/rc.conf.  It appears they're both installed and working.  Running:

dbus-launch

gave me some DBUS_SESSION messages

I also tried:

dbus-launch lshal

which produced a long listing of various devices on the machine.

>
> Then check your ~/.xinitrc for those entries:
>
> 	dbus-launch
> 	exec ck-launch-session mate-session
>
> I have left out additional programs (xset, xbindkeys, xmodmap,
>
>
>
>> The Mate desktop starts with its default configuration except that the
>> size was for a larger monitor display.  I was able to start Mate
>> Terminal, but it was sluggish moving the window.
>
> You can use xrandr interactively from a terminal to set the
> correct screen size. You can make the setting permanent by
> adding it to your ~/.xinitrc, for example:
>
> 	xrandr --fb 1400x1050
> 	xrandr --size 1400x1050

I'll keep that in mind, though with the installation on the other HD
on my computer, that was never required.  However, as I mentioned in
earlier postings, I began with an earlier version of FreeBSD, so that
might have been set back then but not when I installed 11.2 this past
weekend.

I started X on the machine and brought up xterm.  Running xrandr gave
me the message:

Failed to get size of gamma for output default

as well as a listing of available screen sizes.  I reset it using

xrandr --size 1024x768

but running

xrandr --fb 1024x768

still gave me the gamma size error message.


>
> There is also a Mate setting for this.
>
> If it doesn't work, use xorg.conf hard-coded values, for
> example /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/screen-resolution.conf:
>
> 	Section "Screen"
> 	        Identifier "Screen0"
> 	        Device "Card0"
> 	        SubSection "Display"
> 	                Modes "1280x800"
> 	        EndSubSection
> 	EndSection
>
> That isn't nice, but it works. ;-)
>
>
>
>> I was able to restart my machine twice from Mate, so that function
>> appears to work.
>
> There is some documentation regarding Gnome on how to deal
> with HAL, which scatters its stupid XML configuration across
> the /usr/local subtree. This documentation also seems to work
> with MATE.
>
> https://www.freebsd.org/gnome/
>
> https://www.freebsd.org/gnome/docs/faq2.html
>
> https://www.freebsd.org/gnome/docs/halfaq.html
>
> Relevant files can be found in /usr/local/share/polkit-1/actions,
> they should already be installed by MATE.
>

I checked that directory and there were a number of org.*.*.policy
files, including one for Gnome and several for Mate.  I assume these
might the ones I should look at.

>
>
>> So, what does this all mean and would it be possible to salvage the
>> installation?
>
> Yes. ;-)
>
> You are more or less fighting the narrow view of programmers
> who primarily develop for Linux. In order to get MATE working
> on FreeBSD, there is some work you need to do, messing with
> stupid XML files, running outdated system services that were
> abolished in Linux years ago... but yes, sure, it is of course
> possible to get MATE running on FreeBSD, as I refered to from
> an older reference system running MATE; I'm not sure I would
> be able to get a similar system installed and configured on a
> more recent FreeBSD version from scratch... :-)

<snip>

That's sort of what I thought.  Installing everything using earlier
versions of FreeBSD and software packages likely also installed all
the necessary files to get the system running.  But that was several
years ago.  In between time, for some reason, those files were no
longer being installed by the updated versions of those packages.

In other words, I did nearly everything right this past weekend based
on what worked before.  But there might have been some extra things
that needed to be done and that's what I missed.

At least I have the other system to refer to when I check those files.

B. M. Jatzeck


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