Re: Confused about setting up MATE desktop

[Chavdar Ivanov <ci4ic4%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Tue, 20 Jul 2021 at 00:23, Michael Huff <mphuff%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
>
> Hi
>
> I'm building MATE from pkgsrc 2021Q2 in a VirtualBox machine (amd64) and
> so far so good. However, I realize that I'm probably missing a lot of
> steps and I'm not having great luck finding out what all I need to
> build, enable or add to rc.conf. Dbus is an obvious one, but after that
> I have no idea.

Besides dbus, I have also hal and avahidaemon

( sshd mdnsd httpd wscons rpcbind mountd nfs_client nfs_server lockd statd
ntpdate dbus mpd hal avahidaemon autofs cupsd cups_browsed) all have
=YES in my rc.conf. Obviously most of them are not related to mate.

>
> Can anyone fill me in on what configuration steps I need to take after
> building and installing meta-pkgs/mate?

I don't recall anything special building it. Under VirtualBox, I start
it with .xinitrc:

#!/bin/sh
export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/tmp/runtime-${LOGNAME}
test -d $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR ||
        install -d -m 700 -o $(id -u) -g $(id -g) $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR

if [ -x /usr/pkg/bin/dbus-launch -a -z "${DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS}" ];
then    eval $(dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session)
fi
/usr/local/bin/additions/VBoxClient --clipboard
/usr/X11R7/bin/xrandr --output VGA-0 --mode 1920x1080
export XCURSOR_PATH=/usr/pkg/share/icons
exec mate-session


(I keep my locally built copy of the VirtualBox client utilities in
/usr/local/bin/additions; I rebuild the additions with every new
VirtualBox version release and with every new -current version - I
only run -current).

>
> Additionally, I'm not able to find a mixer app or applet to adjust the
> sound volume from the desktop (or even cli) -it looks like one's not
> included? What should I build and install ?

I can add the Volume Control Applet to the toolbar, it works for me.
In the past audio playback frm NetBSD VirtualBox guest used to be
choppy, but now it seems to work very well (the host is Windows 11 +
the latest VirtualBox development build).

I see at the moment that marco is crashing though, so I had to start
openbox in order to have any window manager running... I'll have to
investigate this, but I am getting:
....
kvm_open: /dev/kmem: Permission denied
LibGTop-Server: kvm_open: Permission denied
glibtop: read 8 byte: No such file or directory
...

and marco exits.

>
> Thanks!
>
>

I rarely run mate; I found meta-pkgs/lxqt to be quite well-behaved and
is what I normally run these days. I also have gnome40 (does not run
under VirtualBox at all, but I can run it on bare metal on my laptop
with Intel graphics acceleration), kde4+kf5 (also works well).

Chavdar

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