Newbieish Desktop Questions

[Kristian Holdich]

Hi,

I've recently installed FreeBSD 5.2.1 onto my home pc to use as a
desktop OS and am working through getting it going just right. I have
some experience with administrating earlier versions as headless servers
with 4.x and Solaris, but very little experience with multimedia. I have
a ton of little questions, and minor niggles that i'm sure could be
solved by RTFM and a lot that will be down to personal preference ;)

First up, the system is was an absolute minimal 5.2.1 install, no X, no
packages etc. First thing I did was build cvsup in ports, cvsup ports
and get portupgrade going. I've recompiled the kernel a few times tuning
it to my hardware, getting scsi support for my ide cdrw amongst other
things. I installed x.org from source and put gnome2 / gdm on top of it.
The NVIDIA drivers are running accelerated and my Aureal Vortex2 sound
card works. On top of that I have linux-flash running on Firebird 0.9.1,
Evolution as a mail client and OpenOffice.org running happily.

All in all it's working pretty good, but there are some issues :)

When i su - root, the DISPLAY doesn't seem to get set properly and root
can't open X windows, I can hack this in roots profile, but is there a
better way of doing it?

Speaking of root, i'm so used to Bash i'd like to switch to it for the
root user - is there any gotchas with moving bash to /bin and updating
/etc/shells to allow it?

More media orientated questions, when using Gentoo during bootup before
X started you could switch the console into VESA SVGA and have high
resolution, including having a graphical splash screen to obscure the
boot text before X came up - is there any way to do that.

Another thing Gentoo had was a very flashy screen for GDM, and I assume
KDM too - anyone knowof resources for doing something like that, even if
it's just clip art of Beastie.

Boot sequence, I have FreeBSD on the master drive and Win98 for gaming
on the slave drive, but the boot loader never picked up Win98 during
install what do I edit it get it to see it, or should I install an
alternative loader such as Grub?

I have my fat32 filesystem mounted at /mnt/windows:
/dev/ad1s1     /mnt/windows    msdos   rw    0  0
But it mounts 700 as root, what should I use to change it to 775
root:wheel?

Onto mplayer, got this installed with all the codecs, and installed the
skins and fonts to get it graphical, but it just wont seem to start up
with a gui, and yes i'm using gmplayer any suggestions? Another odd
thing is after it finishes playing it messes up the console and somehow
turns off local echo - anyone experienced this?

DVD playback, neither mplayer nor xine seem to recognise my dvd, i did
the kernel tweaks and devfs tweaks in the handbook:

lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  5 Jul  9 20:14 /dev/cdrom -> acd0
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  3 Jul  9 20:14 /dev/dvd -> acd0
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  4 Jul  9 20:14 /dev/rdvd -> acd0

CDRW burning, what works well on FreeBSD? - I've been a bit spoiled by
Nero on Windows so ideally want something as hassle free as that, used
XCDRoast on Linux and it wasn't bad.

Anyway thanks in advance, no doubt more questions will come up

With Regards

Kristian