GNOME3 ports taking forever to install

[Happymanny1986]

Hello all,

I'm not sure if this goes here or not, but I am new to freeNAS, and I wondered if anyone has experienced this issue:

I decided to try to install gnome using ports so that I could have a graphical interface to manage one of my jails. I originally tried to install gnome2, but I couldn't get it to even begin an installation, and it would quit almost as soon as I typed "make install clean", so I figured I'd try gnome 3 instead.

I ran make install config on the gnome3 folder, and it led me through what seemed like 100 different configuration options before hanging up on something and aborting the installation. I decided to try again and used make config-recursive so that I could take care of all the configuration prompts first then let the server do it's thing. about 50 configuration questions later, I was able to do make install clean again, but that was around 9:30 AM this morning. Its already past 11:30AM now and it's still running the same installation. It isn't stuck or anything - I can still see that it's installing lots of packages - but how long should it really take to install Gnome? I'm worried I screwed something up - it is taking forever, all the fans are going full tilt in the server and making a ton of noise, and when I checked thermals, my CPU is showing 59 degrees C, which is within normal operating temps, but still nearly twice as hot as idle temps. Essentially whatever it's doing is causing the server to utilize 100% cpu capacity.

If it helps my build is as follows:

CPU - Xeon 1276v3
Mobo - Supermicro X10SLL-F
Memory - 32GB Crucial ECC memory
HDDs - 6x 4TB Toshiba 7200rpm in raid 10 connected to a LSI9211 running in IT mode (p16 firmware).

This seems far from normal, has anyone else experienced anything similar?

I know running a desktop environment isn't normal, but I don't have anything important on this server (I just set it up 2 days ago) and I wanted to play around and see what kind of mischief I could cause. That and sometimes managing some software is just way easier through a graphical interface than through the shell.

 

[dlavigne]

Yup, GNOME is huge and has a million dependencies. Any particular reason to not install the pkg?

 

[Happymanny1986]

I would install the pkg, but I keep seeing several sources, here and other freebsd forums, say that installing via ports is a superior/preferred method of doing installs. Would the pkg have been significantly faster? I'm still unclear as to what the main difference between a port and a pkg is to be honest.

I do get that GNOME would have a lot of dependencies, but geez, I could have traveled around the world and made it back by now. I figured that installing gnome couldn't take much longer than the time it would take to install an OS (any OS) from scratch. I wonder why it takes so long, is it simply a byproduct of having to compile each dependency from source code?

 

[dlavigne]

The FN Guide does not say that. It specifically says that unless a pkg is not available or you need to customize an option, you are wasting your time building ports...

 

[Happymanny1986]

Thanks for the heads up. I guess the question now is should I stop the current build and start over with the package now that it's been running for nearly 3 hours?

Aproximately how long could I expect it to take?

Thanks for your help, I really appreciate it.

 

[pirateghost]

On a freebsd laptop I set up, the pkg install of gnome3 was probably about 20 minutes from start to finish to get a functional GUI

 

[dlavigne]

Yup, you can stop the current install and the pkgs will start at the point where it left off.

 

[Jailer]

I know you stated you're just playing around but I do think you would be much better served learning the ins and outs of the cli to manage your jails. It wasn't all that long ago that I had no clue what a jail was let alone "pkg install" and I'm very glad I learned. You'll make some mistakes along the way and likely break things and have to start over, but that's the fun part about a jail. If you break it, make a new one and start over learning from your mistakes as you go.