Early encounters with Gnome and FreeBSD

I would have preferred to title this post with "My adventures with gdm". But the subject line of this email will be useful for someone searching for help. Gnome is a good desktop.

Well, I am not putting before you folk any kind of problem here. I am giving a solution that I discovered for the problem of trying to start gdm on my computer. First a little introduction. Recently I downloaded the disc 1 of the i386 7.0 Release version of freebsd. Then I installed the minimal distribution from this disc. My goal was to have a good desktop so I decided to go for gnome. But, I read in the freebsd handbook that to run gnome, I needed to install X.org system; so I installed the X.org application that came with this disc. Then I installed gnome-lite using

pkg_add -r gnome-lite

command in the terminal.

I wanted to have a login window showing up automatically at boot time and that meant that gdm had to start at boot time. The freebsd handbook mentioned that I had to stick the line

gdm_enable="YES"

at the end of the file /etc/rc.conf. I did that and restarted my computer, but gdm failed to start. After some googling, I found in the page faq2.html that I had to add the line

gnome_enable="YES"

at the end of the file /etc/rc.conf. I removed the 'gdm_enable="YES" and added the previous line. But, gdm still failed to start. Then I added both the previous two lines in this order

gnome_enable="YES"
gdm_enable="YES"

I rebooted, but still gdm failed to start. I had a feeling that gdm was not installed even though the freebsd handbook claimed that gdm will be automatically installed when gnome is installed. I tried installing gdm.

pkg_add -r gdm

I saw that gdm did get installed now. I rebooted by computer and I saw the login window! I logged in and there was my gnome. Jai Jagathguru Srila Prabhupada and Sathguru Bhagwan.