Re: Confused about setting up MATE desktop

[Michael Huff <mphuff%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hi!


On 7/19/2021 10:11 PM, Chavdar Ivanov wrote:
> 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

I couldn't find hal before, but it's right there in sysutils/hal -not 
sure about avahidaemon -is that net/avahi?


> ( 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.

TY! It's a good list to work from; I'll just add things one at a time 
until everything acts reasonable. :)


> > 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).

Sorry I wasn't clear -but you answered what I meant. I meant what 
packages to look for and what to add to /etc/rc.conf mostly.


> > 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.

I recall sound working in NetBSD 7 or so. I'm not sure if the problem 
I'm having is a misconfiguration on my part, changes in VirtualBox, 
changes in NetBSD or all of the above.


> > 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

I remember playing with lxqt on Linux a few years back before settling 
on mate -this may sound weird, but I think for an alternate I'll go for 
a WM (instead of a desktop); specifically icewm or the latest fvwm.

-Michael