Re: Installing, then installing CDE

On 18/08/2026 6:01 pm, Liam Proven wrote:
> No matter; this is just an experimental VM. No need to fix anything, I 
> will just try again. It is all learning.

Small update:

In the end, I have deadlines, and I'd wasted days on this. I could not 
get CDE working. I abandoned it, finished my article, and submitted it 
yesterday afternoon. It should run soon.

I made the changes requested in the README file. I did not expect that 
was a thing! I expect a packaging tool to do such things for me, TBH.

I tried to enable `portmap` from /etc/rc.d but there was nothing related 
in there. I installed it, and it installed something. It did not help. 
That might be the issue.

In the end, I installed LXDE and that pretty much just worked.

I resized the window. I tried `xrandr` but could not work out the magic 
incantation. So I installed `lxrandr` and that worked fine. Saving did 
not work; on a reboot it always went back to 800*600.

I did find that once I made the virtual screen bigger, mouse movement 
became horribly slow and the VM would queue up mouse movements for a 
minute or more. So, when I found the pointer didn't move, I waggled the 
mouse -- and as a result the VM pointer moved randomly on its own for ages.

I suggest this:

https://wiki.netbsd.org/projects/project/virtual-box-guest-tools/

Is a priority.

Someone tried a decade back:

https://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-i386/2014/08/20/msg003310.html

This is a deal-breaker.

Virtualbox is 100% FOSS and runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, and there 
is an experimental/unofficial FreeBSD version too. It is the most 
cross-platform free hypervisor.

I corrupted my VirtualBox VM at least twice more, and got the same error 
about "rc.conf not being enabled" (or something like that.)

It _looks_ like using the `reboot` command is *not safe* in Virtualbox. 
Once I made sure to always use `shutdown -r now` it did not happen again.

I need to wipe and reinstall my hardware partition on my Thinkpad W500, 
and I plan to try CDE again on that.

-- 
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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