Desktop, obsolete settings

This is for those who are familiar with older versions of FreeBSD.

Xorg

Manually setting the option in xorg.conf to the next line enabled the mouse and keyboard:

Option "AllowEmptyInput" "False"

/etc/rc.conf:

hald_enable="YES"

The hald option can be replaced with FreeBSD's native program devd(8), if the options were set in x11-servers/xorg-server before compiling. Some ported programs still use hald, however.

For a custom xorg configuration file:

% Xorg -configure

After testing this configuration, xorg.conf.new would have been copied to /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

% cp /root/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf

SLiM

x11/slim was a practical choice for a login manager, which didn't have remote login access. To enable slim, edit the line in /etc/ttys to :

ttyv8   "/usr/local/bin/slim -nodaemon"           xterm   on secure

Slim requires a *.desktop file, typically in /usr/local/share/xsessions/. This directory is specified in /usr/local/etc/slim.conf next to the sessiondir option. If the directory doesn't exist, create it with the mkdir -p command.

Example of a minimal /usr/local/share/xsessions/fluxbox.desktop file:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=FLUXBOX
Exec=fluxbox

.desktop files are in xdg-style, demonstrated at Desktop Entry Specification.

Customization

To change the background, copy your choice background image to /usr/local/share/slim/themes/default/background.jpg

% cd /usr/local/share/slim/themes/default
% mv background.jpg background.bk.jpg
% cp [pathname/your file] background.jpg

To create multiple themes, you may create a new directory under themes/ that is similar to the default/ directory, then specify this themes subdirectory from /usr/local/etc/slim.conf. If you do this, be sure each used folder ends off with three files named: slim.theme, background.jpg and panel.png.

Add or edit your themes to slim.conf:

#current theme, use comma separated list to specify a set to randomly choose from
current_theme       default,mytheme

To create themes directories:

% cd /usr/local/share/slim/themes
% cp -R default mytheme

Then edit the mytheme/ files to your liking. For more details of slim configuration, type either:

% man slim

% less /usr/local/etc/slim.conf.sample