FreeBSD 13, KDE Plasma 5.22 and Lenovo Thinkpad T410
FreeBSD has always been one of my favourite operating systems.KDE Plasma has always been my favourite desktop, and quite frankly it is one of the oldest programs I run, meaning that I’ve run it for almost all my computer science career!
I’ve decided to install FreeBSD 13 on my old Lenovo Thinkpad T410 laptop. I know it is a very old machine, and it runs an Intel i5 quadcore, first generation, but the machine is still worth using and can serve me very well even at professional training events.
In this article I briefly show how to install KDE Plasma 5.22 on FreeBSD 13. Warning: I’m not going to cover the whole installation of FreeBSD, the configuration of an user account, of
sudo, and stuff like that! I assume the machine has already a FreeBSD installed and can be configured to run KDE Plasma.
The final result of the laptop running KDE Plasma can be seen in this short video:
In the following, the main steps to get the same behaviour.
Step 1: initial packages
In order to get KDE Plasma running we need to install some other packages. For reasons I don’t know, the Plasma package does not install the X Window system automatically, probably because it can be bound to Wayland or other compositors. Therefore, there is the need to installxorg as a package.
The
kde5 is the package to install the Plasma desktop, so there is the need to install, clearly, such package. Now, it is possible to install kde5 before xorg, but you will not be able to run the login manager at boot, so in order to get the setup up and running, you need to install both.
% sudo pkg install xorg
...
% sudo pkg install x11/kde5
...
In particular, the
x11/kde5 consists of a little more than 700 packages!
KDE is somehow Linux centric, less than other desktops, but still tied to Linux. Like it or hate it. What this means, is that in order to be able to run KDE Plasma you have to modify your FreeBSD machine so that it can “mimic” a Linux interface to those pieces of KDE Plasma that require it.
Step 2: changing /etc/fstab
The KDE Plasma requires the operating system to have the /proc filesystem, that is not mandatory in FreeBSD but allows Linux to expose a file based interface to the running processes. This can be easily achieved with a change in the /etc/fstab file that, on my machine, appears as follows:
% cat /etc/fstab
# Device Mountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass#
/dev/ada0p2 / ufs rw 1 1
/dev/ada0p3 none swap sw 0 0
# for KDE Plasma
proc /proc procfs rw 0 0
The interesting part is the last line: it enables the procfs filesystem and configure the system to mount it as
/proc, where Linux exposes it.
Now that the system is ready to cope with the rpcfs filesystem, let’s install
sddm as login manager.
Step 3: install the sddm login manager
sddm is a good login manager that can be easily installed with a single command:
% sudo pkg install x11/sddm
...
Step 4: enable the login manager
In order for the display manager to start at boot, it is required to enable it as a service, so the/etc/rc.conf should have the following lines:
# for KDE and SDDM
dbus_enable="YES"
sddm_enable="YES"
The first line enables dbus, an intra-application communication system. The second line enables
sddm as a service to be started at boot.
Step 5: reboot!
It is now time to reboot the machine and see if the login manager appears.Lenovo Thinkpad T410
Everything is already in place for using the KDE Plasma desktop. However, if the running device is a Lenovo Thinkpad T410, different things are not going to work. In particular, the system is not going to detect correctly the HDMI port (or better, the display port).In order to get it running, there is the need to enable the
i915 kernel module. This is achieved by placing a line in the /etc/rc.conf:
kld_list="i915kms"
but the above will enable the module once the system has already started. In order to enable the module in the early booting stage, configure also the
/boot/loader.conf so that is contains:
915kms_load="YES"
The effect of the above will be see during the boot phase, with the display that changes the resolution while the loading process progresses.
Now, even the display port will be correctly detected, or ehm, read further.
The Display Port Problem (Video Port)
The display port, and therefore the external monitor, will work great if the monitor is detected at boot, that means if the cable is plugged before the computer starts. If the cable is plugged after the computer has already booted, there is somehow the need for a rescan of devices, and this can be found with the trick of:- switching the console from graphical (~9~) to textual by pressing
ALT F1(or another number before 9); - switching back to the graphical console with
ALT F9.
Conclusions
Running KDE Plasma as a desktop on FreeBSD is surely possible, and quite frankly even simple these days.There is no reason to merge these two great products together!