How do I get into GUI?

[Jerry McAllister]

> 
> Hi, my name is Claude, and I'm new to FreeBSD. I've installed it on a hard 
> drive by itself, and I get it to boot. The install seemed to have completed 
> without a glitch.
> 
> My problem is that I expected the booting process to finish in the graphical 
> user interface. Instead, it stops at a CLI prompt. Maybe I did something 
> wrong. I tried re-configuring by booting off the CD, and I selected KDE as 
> my user interface. But something in the configuration goes wrong, and it 
> tells me to select a simpler interface. I've tried a couple of the others, 
> with the same result.

No, generally X is not set up to start automatically on boot.
Check out startx(1) and all its related configuration files and 
possibilities of what it will start up.   Then, after you have it 
set up, when you boot your machine, then log in with your working
account (preferably not root) and type 'startx' and voila you have it.

FreeBSD makes fewer assumptions about what you want.   That means
you have to do a little more to get things set up the way you
want, but it also means you aren't stuck with what someone else
thinks you ought to want.   Most of us are really down on someone
in the northwest doing our thinking and decision making for us 
which is _one_ of the big things that brings us to FreeBSD.

////jerry

> I did not modify anything in the kernel. Is that the problem? My computer 
> has a Soho P4X400 Dragon Lite MB, an Intel Celeron 2.2 GHz processor, 256 MB 
> of DDR400 memory, an Nvidia GeForce2 video card, and otherwise runs Win2000 
> and WinXP Pro flawlessly.
> 
> I've read all sorts of help files, but am still pretty lost. Can you advise 
> me as to how to proceed from here? Is there a forum I can post this to?
> 
> Thank you very much!
> 
> Claude