Rid of those Windows Desktops!
Eric Kjeldergaard
kjelderg at gmail.com
Thu Oct 21 08:33:28 PDT 2004
> I've never really put a lot of time into turning FreeBSD into a solid work
> station which I'm sure it's more than able to be.
certainly the best I've used on the desktop
> For the most part all the workstations will be used for the usuall,
> web,email, irc and local development.
Noted, I'll reply regarding these specifically.
> Cutting the long story short for people who use FreeBSD as a desktop
> currently, what version is recommended at the moment for such a task.
Almost assuredly 5.3 woudl be the way to go. Someone else mentioned
this earlier. It's the version that will allow you to easily upgrade
from stable version to stable version.
> Most of the boxes have fairly good specs, 1.9GHZ plenty of hdd space and
> lots of RAM.
>
> Can people recommend some nice window managers, email clients etc ?
Of course. I can at least tell you what I have and haven't tried/used.
Web: I use konqueror for most of my browsing, but understand that I'm
very much in the minority when I do so. Further gmail is not
supported in it. Firefox is the only other browser that I use
currently in FreeBSd. I've used Opera and Galeon/Skipstone without
any real hatred.
Email: Because I don't try to deviate too much from the kde desktop
currently, (tracking development) I've been using kmail. It has a few
features missing and one of them specifically (delete only deleted
messages from server) does make me use thunderbird sometimes. I've
not tried evolution, although I hear only good things about it.
IRC: I recommend no client more heartily than irssi. IMHO, irc isn't
something that can be easily (or at least hasn't been as I've seen it)
graphicalised. I used XChat for a while, but when I used it it was
relatively unstable. Also, being able to use irssi in conjunction
with screen makes IRC much easier to keep logs.
Local Dev: This depends heavily on what type of development you are
doing. vim/kvim and gcc/g++ is my choice environment for C and C++
programming. It's not a full-flavoured environment, but I find
nothing that I can't do with those tools. If you do Java programming,
I recommend giving netbeans a try. If you are trying to do local
graphical applications, kDevelop isn't so bad.
My usual choice of environment on beefy systems (>= 1.0 ghz 686's) I
tend to use KDE. I like the configurability and it is more full
featured than I'd ever need. A /lot/ of people like to use something
substantially lighter (RAM usage and login time for reasons). One of
the solutions I've found that is very much acceptable to me is a
combination of OpenBox and Kicker (from kde). Gives me a
full-featured bar and system tray coupled with a VERY light window
manager. I would think the best possible suggestion as you embark is
to try a bunch. Fluxbox, Blackbox, Openbox, Gnome, XFCE4, KDE, IceWM,
and more. It never hurts to look at alternatives. I hope this helps.
--
If I write a signature, my emails will appear more personalised.
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