New user - small file server questions and quick GUI question

[Alex de Kruijff]

On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 11:49:31PM +0200, Kaya Saman wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 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.

Beside the two daemons others refered to, you sould also edit ~/.initrc
and ~/xsession. For me both have the line: 'exec startkde'. Thats the
command to start kde.

> 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 would stick with UFS of UFS2. The latter if you don't intent to share
them with *BSD. As I understand ZFS uses quite a lot more resources. If
I wanted to something with RAID I might still use it, but even so still
would use UFS to the system slices.

If you low on disk space you can reduce this. I have used 256M for / in
the past but would advise against this. You would need something like 8G
for /usr. But may need to raise that by 5G if you build ports. I have
larger /temp of 7G, but also build ports there. If you build Java it
would need a least 4G.

> 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?

It's not a problem. The footprint depends more on the ports you like to
run.

> Also just to make sure: NFS, Samba, NTPd, and ISC's Bind are all 
> supported on FreeBSD aren't they??

Some come with the system, others you have to install.
-- 
Alex

Please copy the original recipients, otherwise I may not read your reply.