Install GNOME 3 on FreeBSD

🕐 2 minutes

📅 2022-01-23

GNOME is a user-friendly interface. It has a bar with which applications can be started, and status information can be displayed. Programs and data can be stored on the surface, and standard tools are available.

We will install the full GNOME package gnome3 so that we get the complete GNOME suite on the system.

If you use the latest branch, which I explain to you here. You can install GNOME like this.

$: doas pkg install gnome3

Otherwise, you can install it with this command.

$: doas pkg install gnome3-lite

GNOME requires a mounted /proc filesystem. We therefore add the following line to /etc/fstab so that procfs is automatically mounted at system start:

$: doas nano /etc/fstab =>

proc 	/proc 	procfs 	rw 	0 	0

GNOME needs D-Bus, and we enable the service, so it’s started automatically when the system boots:

$: doas service dbus enable

We use gdm as the session manager. To enable GDM, we do this:

$: doas service gdm enable

As a general rule, it is advisable to start all GNOME services:

$: doas service gnome enable

GDM will now start automatically when the system starts up.