FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE Installation success

[Adam Vande More]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 7:25 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.  :)
>

>From a clean install:

portsnap fetch extract
cd /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/portmaster
make install clean && rehash
portmaster -d x11-servers/xorg-server x11-drivers/xf86-input-mouse
x11-drivers/xf86-input-keyboard x11-drivers/{YOUR VIDEO DRIVER PORT} --
(Could also use the nvidia binary.)
echo 'dbus_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf
echo 'hald_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf

Follow handbook entries on sound, browser, and any other items .  Flashblock
makes flash much more bearable and it's not very intrusive like noscript.

Time spent on this method is considerable especially with slow hardware, but
you have a nice updated system and the build process is quite reliable IME.
99% of the time is spent in compiling, there is very little to 0 time spent
in troubleshooting if you are practiced in the area.

Upgrading an existing install is another matter entirely, on fast hardware I
prefer to clean out all installed packages and start from scratch.

-- 
Adam Vande More