[OpenIndiana-discuss] What Do I Have To Install To Get A GUI ?

[jay at m5.chicago.il.us]

I installed OpenIndiana from the text-mode CD (five months ago, and I
no longer remember why), and now I wish to install whatever
additionally needs to be installed, in order to have a graphical
login.

I have learned that the asterisk is my friend.  At first I thought
that after installing xorg and a few minimal clients, I would at least
be able to run "xinit".  Untrue.  The X server did not run, until I
had installed x11/server/xorg/driver/*.  One would think that if the
X server depends on certain drivers, that those drivers would be, how
shall we say it, dependencies, and that pkg would bring them in when
asked to install the X server, but it does not.

I installed desktop/* thinking that that would give me, how shall we
say it, a desktop.  It does not.  I installed gdm explicitly; but when
I invoked "svcadm enable gdm", it hung indefinitely with the stopwatch
cursor (and CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE did not kill the X server; I had to ssh
in and type "svcadm disable gdm"; how to you get CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to
work?).  Before killing gdm, I did a "ptree gdm" and saw only a few
processes, not the jungle of processes that one expects to find.  Now,
if gdm depends on other programs in order to function, then one would
think that those programs would be -- what was the word again? -- oh
yes, dependencies, and that pkg would bring them in, when asked to
install gdm, but it does not.  Remembering that the asterisk is my
friend, I then installed gnome/* and this indeed resulted in a change
in behavior -- gdm still hangs, but now it hangs with the arrow cursor
instead of with the stopwatch cursor.  It also displays a message in
the lower right corner of the screen -- for a few seconds, and then
the message disappears -- informing me that there is something wrong
with the configuration of gnome-power-manager, and that I should speak
to my system administrator.  I am, alas, the system administrator, and
this advice would have me talking to myself, which, before the
ubiquity of cellphones, would have led to my being labeled a madman
(one of the ways in which cellphones have changed society, is that you
no longer have a reliable way of knowing who is crazy, but I digress).
Before killing gdm again, ptree verifies that many more programs are
running, but that gnome-power-manager is not one of them.

So, having a functioning X server (xinit does now work, although I was
surprised to discover that "pkg install fvwm" reports that there is no
such package, so the minimal desktop is very minimal indeed, with twm)
and having already installed gnome/*, what more must I install so that
"svcadm enable gdm" will enable me to log in, and not, as it does now,
render the entire computer inaccessible except thru ssh?

Bonus question: it would be nice if, when gdm hangs, I could type
CTRL-ALT-F2 or (-F3 or -F4 or -F5 or -F6) and get a textual login.
I have already enabled vtdaemon:default and console-login:vt2 thru
vt6.  It is, apparently, not enough.  When I type CTRL-ALT-F2 I do not
get a login prompt, nor can I even get back to my original screen by
typing CTRL-ALT-F1.  What more must I do?

If you think that these questions are not of general interest, you may
contact me directly using any of the means indicated below.  I thank
you in advance for any and all replies.


	Jay F. Shachter
	6424 North Whipple Street
	Chicago IL  60645-4111
		(1-773)7613784   landline
		(1-410)9964737   GoogleVoice
                http://m5.chicago.il.us
		jay at m5.chicago.il.us

	"But when she traced the killer's IP address ... it was in the 192.168/16 block!"