Installing Lumina Desktop on FreeBSD 11

Lumina Desktop Environment is a desktop environment for Unix and Unix-like operating systems mainly developed for BSD.

In this article let us see how to install Lumina Desktop environment on FreeBSD 11.

FreeBSD 11 can be downloaded from this link. Install FreeBSD according to your requirements, and once the installation is complete, use the following steps to install Lumina desktop evironment.

For more details and documentation of Lumina desktop you can have a look here.

Update the package list

pkg update

Upgrade the packages, in case there are updates available

pkg upgrade

Install the packages required.

pkg install slim xorg lumina-desktop

Add the following lines to /etc/rc.conf to enable mouse daemon, dbus daemon and hal daemon.

tcsd_enable="YES"
tcsd_mode="emulator"
tpmd_enable="YES"
slim_enable=yes
moused_enable="YES"
dbus_enable="YES"
hald_enable="YES"

Create a new user for testing the setup

adduser test

Test the installation by running the following command. The command brings up the Lumina session.

lumina-desktop

The login screen requires a display manager to work. We can use any display managers like XDM, GDM, slim etc to use the login manager. Here lets see how to configure Slim display manager with Lumina desktop.

Add the following line to .xinitrc file in the user’s home directory. If the file was available earlier, create a new file.

exec lumina-desktop

Change the ownership of the above file.

chown test:test /home/test/.xinitrc

Reboot the machine. Now the machine will boot into Slim login where you can login to Lumina session. You will get a screen similar to the image below.

Once you login, this is how your screen will look like: