Friday, June 09, 2006

FreeBSD - Fluxbox + Gdm

I have been in Freenode #fluxbox channel for a while, it seems that many people are asking the same question regarding how to setup fluxbox on FreeBSD, previously I have written how to setup Fluxbox + Gdm in OpenBSD and I think I should write this one for FreeBSD. I will discard the X configuration part because it is similar to the previous OpenBSD Fluxbox post. Here's the quickies -

Installing fluxbox-devel and gdm, remember don't install the old fluxbox, many FreeBSD used to install the old stable version which is not actually stable compare to the recent devel version.

shell>pkg_add -vr fluxbox-devel gdm

Configure it to load through gdm,

shell>cd /usr/X11R6/share/gnome/xsessions

shell>touch Fluxbox.desktop

Adding the lines below to Fluxbox.desktop,

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Fluxbox
Exec=/usr/X11R6/bin/startfluxbox
Icon=
Type=Application

Configuring ~/.xsession

Add this line,

exec startfluxbox

To add it into gdm session alternative,

shell>echo "exec /usr/X11R6/etc/gdm/Xsession \
/usr/X11R6/bin/startfluxbox" >> /usr/X11R6/etc/gdm/Xsession

Now you can find that you have fluxbox as alternative in your gdm menu when you login, just choose it if you want Gdm to lauch Fluxbox after login.

- Go Fluxy -

Cheers (:])

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this. It was extremely helpful.

Anonymous said...

How would I go about starting Fluxbox AND FBDesk at the same time..?

Shahadah_success said...

hello,
did a cd to /usr/X11R6/share/gnome/. didn't had the xsessions directory. So created one and created the Fluxbox.desktop file as shown.
Followed the article in its entirety but what seems to have happened now is that I still do not see any option in the sessions sub menu in gdm and when I log in, I get logged into my original default wm. After I log out of that, instead of returning to the gdm splash screen I get logged into fluxbox.

Could you please explain this behavior and help me get the menu option in the gdm session menu.

Hope to hear from you