After making sure GDM would come up on startup by adding this to /etc/rc.conf…

dbus_enable="YES"
hald_enable="YES"
gnome_enable="YES"

(For some reason, lshal wouldn’t run if gnome_enable="YES" was the only line.)

…I was dismayed to discover that there were no users showing up in the GDM login form. Not even the “Other” option was available to let me log in manually.

Frustrated, I went to search Google. I started typing “freebsd gdm” and then Google Suggest popped up:

Looks like I’m not the only one Googling for that. Turns out I couldn’t find anything on Google — nobody seems to have been bothered to write anything up in an FAQ (which is why I’m writing this post).

On the offchance, I looked in /var/log/messages, and saw some messages quite like the following:

console-kit-daemon[60290]: WARNING: kvm_getenvv failed: cannot open /proc/60378/mem

Turns out FreeBSD doesn’t mount /proc by default, but it is required for GDM to work properly (and, I’d hazard a guess, OpenOffice.org and a whole lot of other stuff). You can easily enable procfs by adding this line to /etc/fstab:

proc /proc procfs rw 0 0

Then, reboot (or if you’re a clever clogs and mounted /proc by hand with mount, restart GDM /usr/local/etc/rc.d/gdm restart), and you should see the users in the login form!

I am a very visually-oriented person, so this makes GNOME very difficult to use. I find myself constantly selecting the wrong items, even though removing the icons doesn’t actually change their position.

But as if that wasn’t bad enough, the “usability” team has taken the KDE approach to the problem. Rather than setting an obvious and sane default (i.e. enable icons in menus), there is a checkbox to enable the icons again. Brilliant! (not)

So you can go to System → Preferences (the first item in the menu, in case you prefer to navigate visually with icons like me) → Appearance (the second item in the menu), and under the Interface tab, you can check the box “Show icons in menus” to get the menu icons back, which gives temporary relief.

Like many GNOME features, this one is only partly implemented. GNOME’s new ‘feature’ also removes stock icons from buttons, and the above option does not put them back (well, seeing as though it is captioned “Show icons in menus” I don’t see why it would, but if you’re going to take the KDE approach, you may as well go the whole hog and add another option still).

At first, I thought this was a bug in Ubuntu Karmic (I am running the alpha on my desktop right now). While there’s nothing like being able to have the suspense of not knowing whether your computer will boot up in the morning, I thought this was preposterous. After I found out it was an intentional change (167 KB PDF), it now seems that it’s plain baloney.

Normally, your monitor’s refresh rate will be something around 75hz, so 50fps, which is less than your monitor’s refresh rate, is hardly optimal. Fortunately, you can fix it with this simple patch:

diff -ur metacity-2.22.0.orig/src/core/compositor.c metacity-2.22.0/src/core/compositor.c
--- metacity-2.22.0.orig/src/core/compositor.c	2008-03-10 08:49:15.000000000 +1100
+++ metacity-2.22.0/src/core/compositor.c	2008-10-25 11:30:13.000000000 +1100
@@ -1290,16 +1290,18 @@
   if (compositor->repaint_id > 0)
     return;

-#if 0
-  compositor->repaint_id = g_idle_add_full (G_PRIORITY_HIGH_IDLE,
-                                            compositor_idle_cb, compositor,
-                                            NULL);
-#else
   /* Limit it to 50fps */
+  /*
   compositor->repaint_id = g_timeout_add_full (G_PRIORITY_HIGH, 20,
                                                compositor_idle_cb, compositor,
                                                NULL);
-#endif
+  */
+
+  /* Nah, let's do 75fps */
+  compositor->repaint_id = g_timeout_add_full (G_PRIORITY_HIGH, 13,
+                                               compositor_idle_cb, compositor,
+                                               NULL);
+
 }
 #endif

The timeout is changed from updating every 20 milliseconds (1000msec ÷ 50fps = 20msec), to every 13 milliseconds (1000msec ÷ 75fps ≈ 13msec), which makes it much smoother.

When the dialog came up, I was greeted by an amusing message:

Indeed, it was an easter egg, because every other time I brought up the dialog, it displayed a normal message instead.

GNOME, by default, doesn’t actually have the “Quit” menu. Instead, it has “Log Out username” and “Shut Down”. Those menus bring up dialogs that have a timer, so if you don’t click Shut Down/Log Out or Cancel in the resulting dialog, it will go ahead and shut down anyway.

Handy for if you click System → Shut Down when you’re in a rush to get out of the house, and forget about the dialog that comes up, because you ran off before it came up.

It’s really easy to enable. Just type this in a terminal:

$ gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/panel/global/upstream_session true

Either type killall gnome-panel, or log out and log on to see the changes.