From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG  Tue Jan 17 16:19:12 2012
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Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2012 09:19:11 -0700 (MST)
From: Warren Block <wblock@wonkity.com>
To: David Walker <davidianwalker@gmail.com>
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	(wonkity.com [127.0.0.1]); Tue, 17 Jan 2012 09:19:11 -0700 (MST)
Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Using Gnome ...
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On Wed, 18 Jan 2012, David Walker wrote:

> I did a pkg_add ...
> # pkg_add -r gnome2
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x11-wm.html
> http://www.freebsd.org/gnome/docs/faq2.html#q1
>
> I tried to enable Gnome by editing /etc/rc.conf ...
> gdm_enable="YES"
> gnome_enable="YES"
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x11-wm.html
> http://www.freebsd.org/gnome/docs/faq2.html#full-gnome
> Note the difference there.
>
> If I reboot I get a message to the console that gdm is starting but it
> goes to a console login.
>
> Is there anything else I need to do?

At least some of the desktop environments don't actually depend on X, so 
it may not have even been installed.  'pkg_info -Ix xorg-server' should 
show xorg-server installed.  Otherwise, 'pkg_add -r xorg' is needed.

An alternative with less setup is PC-BSD (http://pcbsd.org), a desktop 
version of FreeBSD.  The "Isotope" version offers KDE, GNOME, Xfce, and 
LXDE.