FreebSD grapical Installer

[jmccue]

Seem FreeBSD is looking at a GUI Installer:

https://www.osnews.com/story/139545/...cal-installer/

[bsd-keith]

What FreeBSD 'needs' is a means to install a basic GUI desktop...NetBSD & OpenBSD have that option, even though they use relatively old looking window managers.

[Eric]

"Although unlikely, I hope OpenBSD, too, can perhaps consider making some minor affordances to desktop users"

God I hope they don't change the installer. What could possibly be easier then smashing the enter key a few times, creating a user account, host name and rebooting.

[blackhole]

Originally Posted by bsd-keith

What FreeBSD 'needs' is a means to install a basic GUI desktop...NetBSD & OpenBSD have that option, even though they use relatively old looking window managers.

Not really. There is documentation: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/x11/

Unlike OpenBSD, for example, FreeBSD provides x server in ports/packages, rather than as part of the base system. I'm not sure where things stand on base system components (i.e. an installer) depending on components in the ports tree (pre-compiled packages in this case). That could be a mess.

OpenBSD has their own x server build system (xenocara) and it is integrated into the base system along with a simple, licence compliant, window manager.

For users who want a "ready to run" desktop, there are a plethora of alternatives and even FreeBSD derivatives such as GhostBSD.

[bsd-keith]

Originally Posted by blackhole

Not really. There is documentation: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/x11/.......
For users who want a "ready to run" desktop, there are a plethora of alternatives and even FreeBSD derivatives such as GhostBSD.

That's a full DE environment - Open & Net give a 'basic' WM environment option - no X/GUI installed, unless you specify it, (I have both as installations).

FreeBSD can be a nightmare to get a basic GUI up & running, unless something drastic has happened since the last time I looked at doing so, that's one of the reasons I stick to using Open &/or Net.

[blackhole]

All I can say is that it works here.

I install drm-510-kmod, gpu-firmware-kmod, xorg, lightdm and xfce from packages.

/etc/rc.conf

hostname="blackhole"
keymap="uk.kbd"
ifconfig_re0="DHCP"
# Set dumpdev to "AUTO" to enable crash dumps, "NO" to disable
dumpdev="AUTO"
dbus_enable="YES"
lightdm_enable="YES"
avahi_daemon_enable="YES"
avahi_dnsconfd_enable="YES"
kld_list="/boot/modules/i915kms.ko"
sshd_enable="YES"

As per the handbook, add user to video group:

# pw groupmod video -m username

No need for xorg configuration.

//edit: that reminds me - I don't think I need avahi any more - that was for KDE as I recall and I've not used that in maybe 2 years...

[grahamperrin]

Originally Posted by bsd-keith

… to install a basic GUI desktop …

The FreeBSD ports collection includes what's probably the best-known solution:

sysutils/desktop-installer

[grahamperrin]

Originally Posted by Eric

… I hope they don't change the installer. …

I'm delighted to note that it's too late to grant your wish. From the most recent status report for the work:

… The most important objective of this project was to improve bsdinstall, regardless of the success of this integration. …

[blackhole]

To me the rationale for this makes little sense, and smacks of marketing:

The first hurdle to overcome when testing a new Operating System is to get it installed. What is more, the first impression new users gather from an Operating System is its installation process. The state of the art for Operating System installers nowadays definitely involves a graphical process. This is the case for mainstream systems but also for other UNIX systems comparable to FreeBSD: RedHat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Debian GNU/Linux, or even Devuan GNU+Linux Regardless of the technical level of the actual user, this is how the platform will be compared in the public eye.

It equates to a lot of man hours time and labour for "first impressions". Then, when the user completes the installation, they are presented with a standard FreeBSD installation, which will not include X.org or a desktop environment, nor many of the additional UI tools which it has taken the likes of Canonical, openSUSE, Red Hat, et al decades to develop and refine... so it seems like a fancy graphical installer is just one very small step and perhaps a rather futile one at that - if all of the associated "bling" that comes with a typical desktop focused Linux dsitro does not follow...

Why should FreeBSD reinvent the Linux desktop distro wheel, instead of just continuing to do what it does best?

I would like to know who has had trouble with the standard FreeBSD installation process (bsdinstall) and if they think that trouble could have been avoided by use of a graphical installer?

[Eric]

"Although unlikely, I hope OpenBSD, too, can perhaps consider making some minor affordances to desktop users"

I said that in reference to OpenBSD making changes as well. Apologies for the confusion. Regarding FreeBSD meh... I don't interact with it often enough to care.

[bsd-keith]

Originally Posted by grahamperrin

The FreeBSD ports collection includes what's probably the best-known solution:

sysutils/desktop-installer

Then that needs to be an option when installing FreeBSD, not left for people to (hopefully) find it...

[Carpetsmoker]

Originally Posted by bsd-keith

What FreeBSD 'needs' is a means to install a basic GUI desktop...NetBSD & OpenBSD have that option, even though they use relatively old looking window managers.

Yes, I agree. Way back in the FreeBSD 4 era, FreeBSD was the first non-Windows OS I tried. I managed to install it with sysinstall without too much trouble. The biggest hurdle here was that sysinstall would continually ask me to swap CD 1 and 2.

But afterwards it dropped me in a shell and that's where things got hard. This was when you still had to have a /etc/X11.conf file run "X -configure" to create it (or whatever the file path and command was). I just had one computer and while I kind of knew how commandlines worked, I didn't really know anything about Unix, Window Managers, or any of that, and the X configure thing asked me scary "your monitor might break if you choose the wrong values!"-questions.

The key missing bit for a teenage n00b like me was a "install and start Gnome by default" button, or something to that effect. Today it's a bit easier, but still...

Whether it's "graphical" or "text-based" is a bit of a red herring.

Anyway, I used Mandrake Linux for a while. That broke on an upgrade, after which I tried FreeBSD again. And using Mandrake taught me enough to get started with FreeBSD.