Rid of those Windows Desktops!

[Benjamin Walkenhorst]

Hello,

Brian wrote:

>So
>
>I've been planning this for sometime and finally have the time to do it.
>  
>

Great! =)

[...]

>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.
>  
>

Yes, it is. =) I've been using FreeBSD 5.x on my desktop machine for 
about a year now - I had just one really frustrating experience when my 
box would get quite unstable, but it turned out to be hardware-related. 
Otherwise it's been great. =)
Since you already have experience with FreeBSD, migration won't be too 
painful, I think.
I hope you'll enjoy FreeBSD as much as I do. =)

>For the most part all the workstations will be used for the usuall,
>web,email, irc and local development.
>  
>

Unless you want to do development in exotic languages, FreeBSD is 
perfectly suitable for that.
Firefox/Thunderbird/Mozilla Suite are available for FreeBSD as well as 
lots of other applications.
Same goes for IRC and development...

BTW, FreeBSD is also suitable for e.g. watching TV or DVDs as well as 
lots of digital formats for video and music.
In fact, it detected my on-board soundchip out of the box, whereas both 
Windows 2000 and 2003 didn't.

>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.
>  
>

Version of FreeBSD? Well, technically the production-release is still 
4.x, but as I said, I've been using FreeBSD 5.x on my desktop (AthlonXP 
2400+, now a dual AthlonMP 2400+) for about a year now. Besides the 
hardware-issues (my power-supply  would just fail every now and then), I 
didn't have any trouble.
Also, the release of 5.3 is imminent, which will be the first production 
release to have a 5 in front of the dot. =)
So I recommend version 5. As of now, I'm using 5.3-BETA7, and it works 
great.

>Most of the boxes have fairly good specs, 1.9GHZ plenty of hdd space and
>lots of RAM.
>  
>
What exactly is "lots of RAM"? I think you should have 128MB for a 
graphical environment, preferrably more if you want to run lots of 
memory-eaters (like KDE). I've been happy for a long time with 256MB, 
now I have 512 and am even more happy. =)
But 128 to 256 should be sufficient under most conditions. If they are 
at 1.9GHz, chances are rather good they have more than enough RAM. =)
As for CPU speed, a Pentium III 450 can make for a decent desktop 
machine, so you've got nothing to fear, here...

>Can people recommend some nice window managers, email clients etc ?
>  
>

Window Manager: I use Window Maker. I've been using it for some years 
now, and I love it. It's easy to use, doesn't waste my ressources and it 
has everything I need, namely virtual desktops. Plus, it has a sidebar 
that can be extended with useful DockApps.

Email/Web: I use Firefox and Thunderbird happily. Again, they are quite 
easy to use, not too ressource-hungry and got everything I need. 
Thunderbird has excellent junk-mail detection, Firefox has an extension 
called AdBlock which does a great job at blocking ads.

For IRC i use xchat, though I gotta admit I just chose the first 
irc-client that came to mind.

For programming I like gvim, since it's... well, vi plus some useful 
enhancements. Emacs I just use for HTML... (Probably Emacs is great, but 
I don't know any lisp and haven't had much success at learning it)

>Or point to some documentation on building a secure stable desktop
>enviroment.
>  
>

Uh, the handbook? You can install it locally along with FreeBSD. I've 
you've worked with FreeBSD before, you probably know it already.
Especially, you might want to look at 
http://www.de.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/desktop.html

Also, if you are willing to spend some money, "The Complete FreeBSD" by 
Greg Lehey is really great. It's both a good beginner's introduction 
into various tasks and a useful reference (it covers version 5.x). 
"Absolute BSD" by Michael Lucas is said to be good, too, but I don't 
know if it covers 5.x.

Kind regards,
Benjamin