stas' weblog

For a long time I have been asked whether I'm planning to port entrance to FreeBSD or not. Entrance is a graphic login manager similar to XDM but built around Enlightenment project E17 core libraries and with e17 look&feel. But this application has a lot of drawbacks too - the code isn't stable enough, so it's not a good idea probably to use it as login manager running as root.

After several recent inquries, I decided to create a port for this anyway, thus FreeBSD users will be able to preview and test this beatiful XDM replacement. If you're interested, you can download the port tarball here.

If you want for entrance to start automatically on startup either add an appropriate line to /etc/ttys, or define entranced_enable="YES" in /etc/rc.conf. You can also run entrance by hand by executing ${PREFIX}/sbin/entranced. By default, entranced on FreeBSD binds to first free tty (ttyv8), thus if you've tweaked your ttys configuration so ttyv8 isn't free anymore, change entrance config before trying to run it. You can use entrance_edit utility to tweak its configuration.

If you want to preview entrance in existing X11 session, run entrance -T. This will open a new X11 window with entrance running inside it.

PS: I have no plans currently to add this to the ports collection due to issued described above. Someone need to audit the code before it could be added to the official collection.

As you may noticed, the enlightenment-devel port as well as other e17 ports were updated to the latest snapshot. Well, there's was enough time from the previous update, many things has changed and stability was generaly improved.

If you have problems building enlightenment from ports, try rebuilding x11/ecore with DBUS support enabled, enlightenment rely on this ecore feature in the builtin file manager. Don't worry, it doesn't depend on dbus library and adds a very few code (via loadable shared library).

Also, the startup command of enlightenment was renamed to enlightenment_start, so don't forget to update your .xinitrc

BTW, oleczek submitted a port for new e17 module elucence, and I have finished it. This module uses xcompmgr to manage windows opacities in a beautiful way. However, it can be slow as an evil on some video adapters, and doesn't behave well with current e17 version (e.g. it has no module icon). If you interested, download it here.