Installing Mate desktop on FreeBSD-10

For installing Mate desktop in FreeBSD 10, the following steps can be used.

Install the needed packages

pkg install xf86-video-fbdev mate-desktop mate xorg

Add the following lines to /etc/rc.conf

moused_enable="YES"
dbus_enable="YES"
hald_enable="YES"

Test the installation.

xinit mate-session

Mate doesn’t have a display manager of its own. Hence we can use any other display managers like XDM, GDM, slim etc to use the login manager. Here lets see how to configure Slim DM with Mate desktop.

Install Slim

pkg install slim

Add the following line to /etc/rc.conf

slim_enable="YES"

Add the following line to .xinitrc file in the user’s home directory

exec mate-session

Reboot the machine. Now the machine will boot into Slim login where you can login to Mate session.

Alternatively if you want GDM, use the following steps

Install GDM

pkg install gdm

Add the following line to /etc/rc.conf

gdm_enable="YES"

Reboot the machine. Now the machine will boot into GDM login where you can choose between Gnome or Mate session.