The purpose of desktop-installer is to help you quickly and easily set up the most reliable and secure desktop system available, so you can spend your time on creative work rather than repetitive and tedious systems management.
FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD are highly-evolved, free operating systems, that provide all the features necessary to make a great desktop system for WEB browsing, editing documents, playing music and videos, developing software, and much more. They also offers solid support for most popular PC hardware.
However, fully configuring a stock BSD desktop system by hand is a bit like assembling a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. It's a great thing to do once for the learning experience, but beyond that, it's probably not a good use of your valuable time.
There is much more to configuring a complete desktop system than installing a desktop environment. There are many important issues that new BSD users are unlikely to know about, such as ensuring that your ports/pkgsrc tree and packages are in sync, how to correctly configure device daemons, D-Bus for process communication, sound and graphics drivers, to name a few.
Desktop-installer is a post-install script that embodies the extensive knowledge needed to configure a clean, reliable BSD desktop system. It automates the process of configuring a BSD workstation or laptop computer, allowing typical users to set up a fully functional desktop environment in about 15 minutes on modern hardware with a fast Internet connection.
The end result is a fully functional graphical environment comparable to GUI-based systems such as GhostBSD, or Debian or Ubuntu GNU/Linux. However, unlike those systems, desktop-installer supports every desktop environment or window manager provided by the native package manager, every supported version of the operating system, and every hardware platform supported by the operating system.
The most popular desktop environments and window managers are explicitly supported, and any other can be configured with relative ease using the "Custom" menu option.
Desktop-installer installs and configures desktop-independent tools and features, such as automatic updates notification, battery monitoring, and QMediaManager.
The VirtualBox guest environment is automatically detected and configured with the VirtualBox guest additions on FreeBSD, so you can easily try out desktop-installer even if you don't have a spare PC. On other BSDs that do not have guest additions, we recommend configuring the VirtualBox to use the USB Tablet as its pointing device. This at least provides seamless mouse integration with the host.
Parallels and VMWare Fusion are also automatically detected and configured with a basic graphics setup on FreeBSD. Hyper V can also run FreeBSD, but in our experience it is slow and unreliable. Windows users are advised to install VirtualBox instead. Note that Hyper V should be disabled via Control Panel if you are running a different virtualization system.
Desktop-installer is strictly a configuration tool, i.e. a convenient user interface for integrating standard BSD tools and ports/packages. Unlike most desktop distributions built on BSD and Linux, desktop-installer does not duplicate components of or add components to the base system. Our goal is to work with the underlying operating system, not around it, integrating the many features already provided by BSDs to create a fast, stable, and secure desktop experience.
BSD operating systems are fabulous for running open source software, due to their unparalleled reliability and security, and convenient software management. FreeBSD, in particular, has the second largest curated package collection (called FreeBSD ports) of any operating system, not too far behind Debian packages. Furthermore, FreeBSD ports tend to be more up-to-date, as tracked by https://repology.org/. BSD systems + open source software provide everything most people need for their daily computer use, including office suites, multimedia, scientific computing, and much more. You have your choice of dozens of desktop environments to choose from.
The Lumina desktop environment, just one of many of choices:
Manage your music with Strawberry, one of over 800 audio packages in the FreeBSD ports system:
BSD is great for science and engineering, as well, with over 2,400 packages in the math and science categories of FreeBSD ports. Below are screen shots of an RNA-Seq differential expression analysis, and GNU Octave, and excellent open source alternative to Matlab.
On FreeBSD, at least, it's easy to set up the chromium browser for streaming proprietary content from services like Disney, Hulu, Netflix (which also runs FreeBSD on their content delivery network), Paramount, etc. Desktop-installer will do this for you if you like.
Not many proprietary applications are built to run directly on BSD systems, but there are high quality open source alternatives for most of them anyway. If you really need to run proprietary software, BSD systems support numerous high-quality, free virtual machine monitors, so Windows or other systems can be run as a guest under BSD or vice-versa. Some closed-source software can also be run directly under BSD using the Linux compatibility module (with no performance penalty) or the Wine Windows API emulator.
Desktop-installer is implemented as a post-install script, rather than integrated into the OS installer for the following reasons:
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The BSD installers work fine, and are very fast. With a little practice, a basic BSD system can be installed in under five minutes.
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Many server systems need not and should not have a graphical user interface. Adding one would would be of little use in a data center, and would just mean a lot more packages to upgrade during normal maintenance. This would be a waste of time and bandwidth.
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As a post-install script, you can simply run desktop-installer again if you want to try a different desktop environment, rather than figure out how to configure another DE manually, or reinstall the whole operating system. The rest of your installation is unaffected, and need not even be rebooted in most cases.
FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD are operating systems primarily used by somewhat knowledgeable Unix users, such as professional software developers and systems managers. They are used in many hard-core behind-the-scenes settings, such as the Netflix content delivery network, many popular storage and networking appliances, etc. They can, however, also make a great desktop system for typical daily computing, such as web browsing, document editing, gaming, etc.
Desktop installer is fairly quick and easy to use, but it does require a little bit of Unix command-line knowledge. If you're new to Unix, but somewhat computer-savvy, you should have no trouble using desktop-installer. If you prefer to start with the easiest path to seeing what Unix is about, you may want to first try a system with a simple graphical installer first, such as GhostBSD or Debian GNU/Linux.
Desktop-installer is strictly a configuration tool, i.e. a convenient user interface for integrating standard BSD tools and ports/packages. Unlike most desktop distributions built on BSD and Linux, desktop-installer does not duplicate components of or add components to the base system. Our goal is to work with the underlying operating system, not around it, integrating the many features already provided by BSDs to create a fast, stable, and secure desktop experience.
Any general enhancements for the sake of desktop-installer will be desktop-independent and available via the ports/pkgsrc collections for use with or without desktop-installer.
One of the primary objectives of desktop-installer is long-term sustainability. Since man-hours are costly, efforts are focused on improving the functionality of the end-result, not the appearance of the tool.
Desktop-installer does not try to compensate for BSD's shortcomings. We prefer to leave them exposed so that there is motivation to fix them in the BSD base or ports system.
Desktop-installer will not impose any arbitrary limitations. While the GUI distributions tend to support only AMD64 systems running the latest BSD release, desktop-installer allows you to use any supported version of BSD on any supported CPU architecture. ARM, PowerPC, RISC-V and Sparc are treated no differently than x86. Desktop-installer has been tested on an iMac G5 and a Rock 64, in addition to numerous x86 PCs and laptops. While we can't guarantee that all ports/packages will work on all platforms, desktop-installer won't stand in your way.
FreeBSD supports two major releases at any given time, e.g. 13.x and 14.x. We strongly recommend using the latest major FreeBSD release for desktop systems. Legacy releases may be preferred for certain server applications, but they may not have the latest device drivers and base libraries needed for some desktop applications.
First perform a basic BSD installation by booting from an install CD, DVD, or USB drive. The standard BSD installers are relatively easy to use and flexible enough for most installations. Use one of the install images at https://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/ISO-IMAGES/, https://netbsd.org/, or https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#Download or one of the mirror sites.
To install from a USB stick, download the a ".img" image file and image the USB drive with it. Under Windows, you can use a tool such as Rufus. On Unix systems (including macOS), you can use the dd command. Replace "file.img" with the name of the file you downloaded and "/dev/da0" with the name of the device that appears in /dev when you plug in a USB stick.
dd if=file.img of=/dev/da0 bs=64k conv=sync
If installing from a CD/DVD drive or installing on a virtual machine, download a .iso image. Use CD/DVD burning software to burn a disc for real hardware, or just load the .iso into the virtual CD/DVD drive in the virtual machine. A -disc1.iso file is a generally a good choice. The -disc1.iso.xz files will download faster and can be uncompressed with "unxz" if you have it. Choose "amd64" for an x86-based PC, or "aarch64" for a VM on ARM-based Macs.
Boot from the USB stick or CD/DVD drive and follow the instructions on the screen to install your BSD base system. This can usually be completed in a few minutes by experienced users, but your first time through, you should take your time and read all instructions carefully.
If installing under VirtualBox, we DO NOT recommend using the VM images provided by FreeBSD. A fresh install from the disc1 ISO image can be completed in under 5 minutes, so a preconfigured VM image doesn't offer much convenience. A fresh install also allows you to configure your VM settings, disk size, and base FreeBSD installation as you want, instead of figuring out how to modify the preconfigured VM image afterward.
Also important for VirtualBox: Use the vboxsvga virtual GPU rather than vmsvga for FreeBSD. At the time of this writing, it works better with VirtualBox guest additions for features such as automatic screen resize.
System clocks may be set to local time or UTC (GMT). Make sure the virtual machine and host are in agreement on this. VirtualBox has a check box in system settings for systems with the clock set to UTC.
Lastly, adjusting the boot order of the VM will make the guest OS installation a bit smoother. Configure the VM to boot from hard disk first, then optical disk (you will use a .iso file for install). The VM will then boot from the .iso image during install (since there is no operating system on the hard disk yet), and from the virtual hard disk after install.
If you have a high-end machine with 4 or more GiB of RAM, you may want to try booting FreeBSD from ZFS. BSDinstall makes booting from ZFS easy whether you are using a single disk, a mirror, or a RAID-Z array with multiple disks.
For low-end machines with less than 4 GiB of RAM, UFS2, with its small memory footprint, may provide better overall performance. UFS2 is a highly underrated file system offering great performance, reliability, and features, so don't think you're missing out by not using ZFS. In fact, Netflix uses UFS2 to deliver content from its CDN. ZFS is most beneficial to high-end storage servers and usually not much of an advantage on the average laptop or desktop machine.
FreeBSD's BSDInstall is menu-driven and fairly self-explanatory if you take default options, but if you want to customize your installation or if you're new to operating system installations and want detailed instructions, you can find them in the FreeBSD Handbook. Below are some basic pointers to get you through without all the gory details.
If installing under VirtualBox:
- Select the VBoxSVGA video adapter
- Load the FreeBSD disc1 or other ISO file into the virtual CDROM
- 1G RAM is sufficient
FreeBSD install:
1. Accept default answers to most questions.
1. A few pointers:
- Hostname:
Full hostname, e.g. freebsd13.local, freebsd13.my.domain
- System components:
Don't bother with ports, will install later
Installing src now will save a little time
- Filesystem:
Auto (UFS) for most installs, ZFS for high-end systems
Entire disk, GPT for most systems
- If installing on real hardware:
Enable powerd
- Whether real hardware or virtual machine:
Enable moused (solves problems with various mouse drivers)
Enable ntpdate, ntpd, clear_tmp
- Add users: no (auto-admin does this better)
- If installing under VirtualBox:
It's hard to eject CD fast enough after Reboot
Use ACPI shutdown in Machine menu instead, then eject virtual CD
After completing the installation and rebooting, log in as root and install the desktop-installer port or package:
FreeBSD: pkg install -y desktop-installer
NetBSD: pkgin -y install desktop-installer
On OpenBSD, desktop-installer is currently available as a WIP package at https://github.com/jasperla/openbsd-wip.
Run desktop-installer as the root user and follow the instructions on the screen.
Note that desktop-installer will halt on most errors. This is fairly rare, but it can happen. Broken ports/packages are the most common cause of this. If you run into any problems while running desktop-installer, resolve the problem manually, and simply run desktop-installer again. It will remember your previous answers, so you can quickly get back to where you left off.
Many common tasks, including some described below, can be performed via the Auto-admin menu. Simply run "auto-admin" and select an option.
Subscribe to the FreeBSD security notifications list. This is a spam-free, very low-volume email list to notify users about important security updates for FreeBSD. Typically a small group of security fixes are announced once every few months.
Update your system frequently using "auto-admin"
Also, we don't recommend overusing upgrade tools on any operating system. It is best to periodically back up your files and do a fresh install, in order to clean up any corruption that has accumulated due to user error, improper shutdowns, and bit rot.
Most software on FreeBSD systems is installed from the FreeBSD ports collection. The ports system allows you to quickly install pre-built binary packages, or just as easily (but slowly) build from source with alternative build options such as additional compiler optimizations or optional features. FreeBSD's ability to automatically install from source also you to cleanly and easily install software whose license forbids redistribution as a binary package.
FreeBSD has strong default security settings and is immune to most malware, but even a technically secure system is only as safe as your own habits. Secure your password and change it frequently. Be careful about running arbitrary software downloaded from the web or from a USB stick. Installing all of your software via FreeBSD ports adds a strong layer of security, but not a guarantee.
Back up your important files regularly, preferably off-site. It's easy to do using rsync or one of the backup tools available in the FreeBSD ports collection. If your disk fails, just install a new disk, quickly rebuild your system using desktop installer again, and restore your files.
Use the auto-admin menu to manage user accounts. Be sure to add new users to the "wheel" group to allow "su" to root, the "operator" group to allow use of "shutdown", and the "video" group to ensure optimal graphics performance.
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Perform a minimal FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD installation using the standard installer
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Install the desktop-installer package:
FreeBSD: pkg install desktop-installer
NetBSD: pkgin install desktop-installer
OpenBSD: Package currently under development in the OpenBSD ports WIP collection.
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Run "desktop-installer"
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Carefully read and follow the instructions on the screen
Desktop-installer began as a simple script to automate the setup of a blank FreeBSD system with XFCE desktop. However, I quickly realized that about 95% of the code had nothing to do with XFCE and applied to any desktop environment (DE), so I soon added a menu and separate shell functions for additional DEs. Desktop-installer has since evolved into highly a sophisticated script that configures many core components of BSD systems to produce a full-featured, stable, and secure desktop system.