Date: Sat, 27 Jul 2002 23:34:52 -0400 From: Miroslav Pendev <shadow@cybershade.us> To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: What do we need in a FreeBSD desktop? (was: Peter heads back to M$FT WinBloze [support groups]) Message-ID: <20020728033452.GA259@CPE0004761ac738-CM00109515bc65.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com> In-Reply-To: <20020728023016.GA51076@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <00d301c23504$9bbe0c60$0a01a8c0@mswolf> <20020726210341.N20468-100000@earl-grey.cloud9.net> <20020728023016.GA51076@wantadilla.lemis.com>
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On Sun, Jul 28, 2002 at 12:00:16PM +0930, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > On Friday, 26 July 2002 at 21:10:08 -0400, Peter Leftwich wrote: > > On Fri, 26 Jul 2002, Michael Wells wrote: > >> Peter, I can surely understand your frustrations. I have has some real X86 > >> issues lately and have had to spend literally hours fixing my own > >> mistakes trying to upgrade my source. I am getting hooked on this > > > > Totally the essence of my post and complaint. FreeBSD is superb... if you > > are comfortable in a text environment. Can anyone out there among you > > imagine being shell-only from Feb 16th 2002 til mid Jul 2002? > > > > Will FreeBSD's core of developers ever leap into integrating X *and* a > > window manager (something similar to Windows)? I surely hope so. > > This one has been done to death, almost. X is part of the FreeBSD > distribution. You can install it really easily. I've been using > FreeBSD (and BSD/386 before it) as my desktop exclusively for over ten > years, so it can be done. The real problem I have is knowing which of > the over 7,000 ports you want to install to get "basic" desktop > functionality. Some time ago I created the "instant-workstation" > port, but didn't make much noise about it. instant-workstation > basically installs a number of dependent ports (see below for a list) > and then does some minor configuration. Over the past couple of days > I've been installing a brand new machine (laptop) for a friend, and > I've been looking at the rough edges. Here's what I've found: > > 1. Some of the dependent ports don't build cleanly. This obviously > requires some attention. > 2. "instant" is a misnomer, at least if you build from source. I'm > building on a Dell Inspiron 7500 with a 600 MHz processor, and it > takes over 12 hours. > 3. Once it's built, it works "out of the box". I've installed the > XFree86 4 port, and installation is really nothing more than this: > > # X -configure > # mv /root/XF86Config.new /etc > # echo exec kdestart > ~me/.xinitrc > > You can then run startx or xdm and end up in a relatively complete > kde environment. > > So what's in instant-workstation? Currently I have: > > acroread > bash > cdrecord > dos2unix > emacs > fetchmail > gs > grip > gimp > gv > gpg > ispell > startkde > mkisofs > mount_smbfs > mutt > netscape > xtset > xmms > xv > > My questions to you: is there anything missing? Has anybody tried > instant-workstation? I'd be interested in suggestions about how to > improve it. > > Greg Hi Greg, I usualy install wget and netcat (for diagnostics). Altough, you can live without them... ;-) --Miro To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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