Install Mate on FreeBSD

🕐 1 minutes

📅 2022-01-27

Mate is a fork of the now obsolete code-base of the GNOME 2 desktop environment. Active work is underway to add support for new technologies while maintaining the traditional desktop experience.

We run the following command to install Mate from the FreeBSD official repository.

$: doas  pkg install mate

After the installation is complete, we need to activate the services for our Mate desktop environment. To complete this, we simply need to run the following commands.

$: doas service moused enable
$: doas service dbus enable

In contrast to GNOME or KDE, Mate does not have its own login manager. We’ll be using Slim instead.

So that Mate can be used under Slim, we add the following line in .xinitrc.

$: doas nano .xinitrc =>

exec mate-session