New user - small file server questions and quick GUI question

[Kaya Saman]

Hi guys,

first up I hope I am in the right place as my questions are of a generic 
nature about FreeBSD as I consider myself a new user not having much 
mileage with the OS as of yet!

Secondly I just wanted to wish everyone a happy Christmas and New Year 
also since we are in that period :-)

I will start with my GUI question as I believe that it is something simple:

I attempted an install of 7.2 stable on my laptop and subsequently 
installed X11also. Now I didn't have any Xorg.conf file but each time I 
tried to start X from the CLI using the normal startx command (read the 
documentation through fully beforehand) but I didn't manage to get the 
mouse or keyboard to even work let alone starting the Gnome2 interface.

Now I don't have that particular machine with me now as it's in another 
country but just wanted to know a few possible causes for the issue. I 
am guessing it's probably tied into not having the xorg.conf file but I 
will install a VM of it soon and be more specific with logs etc.... as I 
am used to Linux and Sun Solaris I know this is really ad-hoc and 
frowned upon way of asking which will probably earn me minus brownie 
points but just wanted a quick idea of what maybe so when the time comes 
I can investigate further!

The second and main question that I wish to ask is more to do with 
peoples opinions or experienced BSD users advice:

I am looking to setup a small file server which I will use as DNS and 
NTP server also. The reason for selecting FreeBSD is that the system I 
about to install onto doesn't have much memory (not sure how much but 
probably in the region of 300-500MB perhaps) and although Linux would 
definitely suite this kind of system as Solaris needs round 2GB or so 
for OpenSolaris, I am quite interested to learn FreeBSD but also take 
advantage of the ZFS file system which is standard now in version 8.

I won't be installing a GUI on this machine since it is going to be a 
server so I would like to know if BSD has a small footprint memory and 
CPU wise for me to run on the machine in question which is a PIV?

Also just to make sure: NFS, Samba, NTPd, and ISC's Bind are all 
supported on FreeBSD aren't they?? I know this is a bit of an RTFM issue 
here but for example the Solaris implementation of NTP and even SNMP are 
slightly different from the GNU or GPL based ones in Linux so therefor I 
have to ask :-)

Many thanks for any responses!!!!

Best regards,

Kaya