FreeBSD 13, Xfce with XDM in Spanish

 Hello everyone, in this tutorial I'm going to show you a how to do to have XFCE and xdm (display manager) on FreeBSD 13, optional you may want to translate to your language, in this case my default language is Spanish. Ok let's go!

I am going to update my other tutorials about FreeBSD and Xfce in this blog, this post it is 😀.

Result:

1. Download the .iso image from FreeBSD web site, I chose cpu i386 option.

2. Install the operating system, You can watch my video in my Youtube Channel 😀.

3. I will use pkg to add some package, them FreeBSD offers you to install the package, afterwards install xorg package...

#pkg update

#pkg install xorg

4. It is time to add xfce package and add dbus daemon to /etc/rc.conf

#pkg install xfce

#echo '#DBus' >> /etc/rc.conf

#echo 'dbus_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf

and you can start the daemon

#service dbus start

5. Now we need to create some files, e.g. .xinitrc for your user (/home/your-user), then add a line into your file.

before maybe you want to read some example, e.g.

#find / -iname xinitrc

then in that example say you how to start xfce when you use starxt as command.

change to your user account

$touch .xinitrc

$echo 'exec ck-launch-session xfce4-session' > .xinitrc

6. this point is optional to do, it depends of your language; then to translate to Spanish language I did it (I modified default language)

$vi .login_conf

me:\
    :charset=UTF-8:\
    :lang=es_ES.UTF-8:

To know what option you have, then you can query, in my case I need Spanish option 😀, it can be different for you case, then change "es" words 😌.

$locale -a | grep es_

Afterwards  you should reboot your system, it is necessary to read the last file.

7. You can start xfce with the next command

$startx

You can see XFCE desktop 😀

Maybe you want to add the next package to build your directories

#pkg install xdg-user-dirs

$xdg-user-dirs-update

$ls

Note: don't worry about restart and shutdown buttons, they are enabled, because .xinitrc has all things to make it 😌

8. But I want to use login display manager when I am starting my system, then we are going to use xdm package

#pkg install xdm

Afterwars we need to edit some line to start xdm in boot time, find the next text.

#vi /etc/ttys

ttyv8   "/usr/local/bin/xdm -nodaemon"  xterm   off secure

And change off option to on

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

9. It is time to copy .xinitrc to .xsession (because the content is the same), this file (.xsession) is mandatory, because xdm works with .xsession

$cp .xinitrc .xsession

$chmod u+x .xsession

10. It is time to reboot the operating system

#reboot

Afterwards you are going to see the xdm display manager and enter your user (no root account, be carefully) and password

 As you see it has a perfect Spanish language.

Optional thing to do: change your language for your terminal emulator, because the default keyboard is US or English, in my case my keyboard is Spanish, then you can use graphical interface form xfce tools

 

11. Also you can add more software, it depends of you 👦

#pkg install firefox gnumeric abiword neofetch sudo unrar zip unzip xcalc cmus vlc mpv epdfview vim

Don't forget to visit my blog and my Youtube channel (subscribe please), I'm sorry, because I could have some mistakes about English language here, my default language is not English, thank you!