On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 11:18:58AM +0100, James Griffin wrote: > I need to install a Dektop Environment for my partner. > > I thought about KDE or xfce, i've tried neither on OpenBSD before. Which of > the 3 main main DE's (gnome, KDE, XFCE) do you feel work best on OpenBSD.
I would recommend XFCE, which I use. It runs reasonably fast on most machines. Functionality-wise it is the simplest of the bunch but it it is also relatively stable. The KDE packages are outdated (KDE 3), efforts for making KDE4 packages available are on-going. If you like KDE3 and it works for you, that's great. But ports for the modern KDE4 are rather experimental at this stage. Gnome requires 3D hardware accelleration which is not available on every system. I once tried to run Gnome on an eeepc 901 with OpenBSD 5.3, and ended up using XFCE instead because Gnome was painfully slow on that small system and crashed often. If you want to run gnome I'd recommend installing OpenBSD-current first, which contains many Gnome-related fixes which are not available in 5.3 (such as much broader 3D hardware support). > I would need things like removable media mounting from within the graphical > environment, good sound support and multimedia applications. Most of desktop-based automounting was written with Linux-only support code that relies on technologies such as udev, which is not available on OpenBSD. You can use hotplugd(8) to simulate an auto-mounter for known USB disks. This requires some scripting. See the hotplugd(8) man page for examples. A reasonable default behaviour of such scripts is to try to mount an 'i' partition if it exists, which is usually an MSDOS filesystem. This will work with any desktop, as it simply causes a new filesystem to be mounted at a known directory. Beware of permission problems if you'd like non-root users to access files on auto-mounted disks. See the mount_msdos(8) man page (-u, -g, and -m options). You might want to browse the package README files for each desktop to learn more about the quirks required to run them (these links point to -current versions and might not apply 100% if you don't run -current): http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/meta/gnome/pkg/README-main?rev=1.21;content-type=text%2Fplain http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/meta/xfce/pkg/README-main?rev=1.2;content-type=text%2Fplain http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/x11/kde/base3/pkg/DESCR-main?rev=1.1;content-type=text%2Fplain
