FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE Installation success

[Ian Gibson]

What's the situation re: PC-BSD? I thought they were 'FreeBSD on the 
desktop', leaving FreeBSD itself to focus on being a great server OS.

Isn't the whole point of PC-BSD to remove the need to do what the OP did 
i.e. spend days or weeks installing and configuring FreeBSD with desktop 
applications?

It seems logical to me to keep FreeBSD as a server OS and build a 
desktop separately on top of this, analogous to what Ubuntu did with 
Debian (only BSD should of course be far superior!).

Ian


On 25/10/10 19:50, Henry Olyer wrote:
> The problem here is that it shouldn't take so much effort to get this
> going.  But I know it does.  And I don't blame the FreeBSD team.
>
> I do blame the organizational infra-structure that exists.  ie., we should
> have scripts that describe every aspect of a computer, so that such scripts
> can be mechanically read and a configuration built.
>
> We do ./configure for software we install.  Same thing, but for all aspects
> of the hardware.  The present "configure" logic covers the OS and the
> installed software, we need to do this for hardware.
>
> I notice that freeBSD download's and installs trails Linux.  That's okay.
> FreeBSD is so much better, and in so many ways, too.
>
> Nothing I've seen in Linux lands comes close to the "sysinstall" command or
> the plainly superior organization of FreeBSD.  What I'm trying to encourage
> is that we, as a group, work on our infra-structures, like strengthing the
> already high level of organization we have in sysinstall.
>
> How about a query program that examines a machine.  Is this practical?
> Something like the automated X-install process that makes it unnecessary to
> set the horizontal and vertical frequencies ourselves (which we used to have
> to do.)  But not for X, for the sound card, for as much as possible.
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 8:25 PM, Michael D. Norwick<mnorwick at centurytel.net
>> wrote:
>
>> 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
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