FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE Installation success

[Michael D. Norwick]

Good Day;

It is with some pleasure that I have finally succeeded in building an 
operative workstation with a custom kernel and world,  Xorg 1.7.5, 
KDE4-4.5.2 from ports, most common network applications as well as 
Firefox3, and Thunderbird 3.1.5.  The machine is an older Dell GX270 P4 
2.4 GHz PC with 3G of ram and an ATI Radeon video adapter.
This install has not been without it's trials.
4 weeks ago I backed up all my data and reformatted from Debian 'lenny' 
to GPT/ZFS/8.1-RELEASE.  The next two weeks did not go so well.  While I 
tried hard to get ZFS formatted drives to work reliably, intermittent 
unexplained core dumps with reboots gave me cause for concern.  I 
finally reinstalled msdos boot records and formatted the drives UFS.  
That install has lasted 2 more weeks.  I liked ZFS v14 and would like to 
try it again when I get more current hardware with more ram and SATA drives.
My next challenge was building KDE4, Firefox, and Thunderbird from 
ports.  KDE4 and friends (QT4) took days on this machine to build, 
install and setup.  I initially installed the ports tree using portsnap 
but was having so much trouble building the mozilla stuff from ports I 
moved to cvsup and portupgrade.  This is also what I used to install the 
kernel and base source tree.  Several iterations of make - clean and 
deinstall/reinstall along with cvsup'ing ports a couple of times finally 
got me to a working browser and mail client.
I have had a time getting Flash working with Firefox.  I have not yet 
got the plugin working in Firefox but Opera, using linux-f10 allows my 
kids view their on-line home school lessons.  Audio was somewhat of a 
challenge to get sound from an AC97 on-board audio chipset.  snd_hda was 
the module that eventually provided the needed audio driver for this 
chipset.  I think I forgot what configuring this stuff was like during 
my 'hamm', 'bo', and 'slink', debian days.

My thanks to the entire FreeBSD/KDE development team on allowing me to 
experience the fruit of their efforts.  I still like turning the knobs 
myself.  I'll keep reading the manuals.  :)

Michael