I never look at the past.

"OpenBSD is an elistist OS, it is too hard to use."

# pkg_add gnome # echo 'multicast_host=YES' >>/etc/rc.conf.local # echo 'pkg_scripts="${pkg_scripts} dbus_daemon avahi_daemon gdm"' >>/etc/rc.conf.local

Just make sure no Display Manager other than GDM is configured to start at boot. That is all there is to it really, so reboot and enjoy.

To make it easier for people to automatically use removable media, like USB sticks and CD/DVD-ROM, I wrote a small application called toad(8) (Toad Opens All Devices). This application talks to ConsoleKit to detect the currently active user and uses this information to mount devices with proper ownerships. It mounts them under /run where GMount (GLib) can see them so that GVFS applications like Nautilus can be used to unmount and/or eject them with a single click (aka Joe-user friendly). toad(8) uses the OpenBSD devices hot plugging monitor daemon: hotplugd(8).

# pkg_add toad

The pr0n:



Since an image is worth a thousand words, here's a short webcast showing GNOME 3.10.2 running on OpenBSD-current (soon to be OpenBSD 5.5):

https://www.bsdfrog.org/tmp/undeadly-gnome.webm



The future:



There is some more and more awareness in the GNOME community that at least two major BSDs (OpenBSD and FreeBSD) have people actively working to make GNOME a viable option for them and I think it can benefit all sides.

As far as my little person is concerned, I am currently working on setting up a buildbot infrastructure with JHBuild to be able to run continuous builds of the GNOME HEAD repository (which the FreeBSD folks are doing already). "JHBuild is a tool used to build the whole GNOME desktop from the version control system". That will help us catch portability issues very early. It will also help OpenBSD fix some of its tools (I am looking at you libtool!).

We spent the last couple of years pushing a maximum number of local patches upstream and as of today, most of then got accepted. But there is obviously still work to do...

The upcoming most challenging task will certainly be to develop compatible APIs provided by systemd and that GNOME uses (timedated, localed, hostnamed and logind). Some parts are trivial, some others not as much.

A special "thank you" goes to Ryan Lortie from the GNOME project who has been an enormous help pushing us to move forward as well as Koop Mast from the FreeBSD-gnome team who has included me in their regular chats and with whom we share most of the same issues.