# PC-BSD Lumina Desktop



## fernandel (May 5, 2014)

http://beta.slashdot.org/story/201151

Looks like that BSD desktop is coming...


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## NewGuy (May 5, 2014)

I tried it. Right now Lumina is still in early alpha stage. It is stable and fast, but does not have many features. It's pretty much Fluxbox at the moment, with some tweaks. Really good start, in my opinion, what is there works well.

Update: There is a port of Lumina available for testing. http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=189378


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## fernandel (May 6, 2014)

NewGuy said:
			
		

> I tried it. Right now Lumina is still in early alpha stage. It is stable and fast, but does not have many features. It's pretty much Fluxbox at the moment, with some tweaks. Really good start, in my opinion, what is there works well.
> 
> Update: There is a port of Lumina available for testing. http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=189378



I installed it and the installation went okay, but when I start it it doesn't show. I just get a dark gray screen. I don't have a problem with Fluxbox or KDE.


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## beanpole (May 9, 2014)

@fernandel,

The dark grey screen issue is identical to something that was asked about in the Lumina FAQ comments on the PC-BSD blog[1], and basically you are running the wrong binary to start up the desktop. The proper binary to start the DE is:
	
	



```
/usr/local/bin/Lumina-DE
```

[1] http://blog.pcbsd.org/2014/04/quick-lumina-desktop-faq/


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## ronaldlees (May 9, 2014)

It's great that they're implementing a new desktop.  I usually say "The more the merrier."   But, alas, Lumina is Qt based, and for me that puts it into the same general camp as KDE, only different.   What I'd really like to see is a very platform agnostic minimalistic desktop that does not depend on specific operating systems or specific software stacks such as the ubiquitous (bloated) graphics king of the open source world (X, X+Qt, X+GTK, etc).  

It could be very minimalistic in the way the Haiku operating system's desktop is, and have only a few of the most interesting drivers, relying mostly on VESA.   Such a great thing could be a drop-in replacement for graphics on any platform, perhaps including bare-metal and bare-metal+ setups, light and heavy embedded, phone, etc.  There is already one such project out there, but it's not as minimalistic as I would like, and probably not portable down to small embedded device systems.  But, carry on  :beergrin


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## fernandel (May 10, 2014)

It was my mistake: Lumina-DE has a capital letter "L". Thank you.
It works so good.


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