One of the motivations for going with gnome desktop this time was the excellent gDesklets. While they can be made to work under KDE it wasn’t pretty and so eventually I stopped using them. Being “native” to gnome they have none of those issues, so I installed them this afternoon.
The results are mixed as the ports for FreeBSD aren’t great. In fact the initial attempt resulted in a non functioning gDesklets app, so I binned it and built from source. This was more succesful and so I now have the basic gdesklet support in place and a few pieces of eye candy installed as well. Dragging the links from the browser to the window is just so damned easy. The logfile that is so cryptically mentioned when gdesklets fails to start turns out to be in ~/.gdesklets/logs/.
I have still to figure out how to control the startup of gnome correctly, which is high on my list of things to figure out.
Gnome is still taking a LONG time to start, which means something somewhere probably isn’t quite right. I’ll have to spend time looking round the web later tonight, but right now it’s just way too hot!