Using gnome-terminal on FreeBSD
This article describes how to use "gnome-terminal" on FreeBSD. I am
specifically using FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE with pkgng.
Installation
As superuser (root), install "gnome-terminal" using pkg install
gnome-terminal or by going
to /usr/ports/x11/gnome-terminal and doing make
install.
Gnome terminal has a huge number of dependencies to install, so to
save time I strongly recommend using pkg over installing
from ports.
The problem
After installing gnome-terminal and running it with
gnome-terminal &the following message appears:
Error constructing proxy for org.gnome.Terminal:/org/gnome/Terminal/Factory0: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.gnome.Terminal: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Spawn.ChildExited: Process org.gnome.Terminal exited with status 8
How to start the terminal without the error
First of all, start the terminal server using
LANG=en_US.UTF-8 /usr/local/libexec/gnome-terminal-server &This starts a background Gnome Terminal server process.
Once this is running, start a terminal using
gnome-terminalThe terminal starts in the usual way.
See also
As an alternative to gnome-terminal, roxterm works moderately
well. It can be installed using pkg install
roxterm. However there are a fair number of bugs. In particular
the inability to copy and paste from non-ASCII text on the terminal
window makes it a poor choice for people regularly using international
text.
Web links
-
A problem with gnome-terminal in Fedora 21, and tracking it down
This post from "Chris's Wiki" by Chris Siebenmann at the University of Toronto describes the design of the most recent gnome-terminal and gnome-terminal-server which make it difficult to start under some environments, and explains how to resolve the problem.