Date: Sat, 10 Jul 2004 10:03:23 +0100 From: Kristian Holdich <kjholdich@yahoo.co.uk> To: "freebsd-questions@freebsd.org" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Newbieish Desktop Questions Message-ID: <1089450203.26300.39.camel@slide.hopto.org>
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Hi, I've recently installed FreeBSD 5.2.1 onto my home pc to use as a desktop OS and am working through getting it going just right. I have some experience with administrating earlier versions as headless servers with 4.x and Solaris, but very little experience with multimedia. I have a ton of little questions, and minor niggles that i'm sure could be solved by RTFM and a lot that will be down to personal preference ;) First up, the system is was an absolute minimal 5.2.1 install, no X, no packages etc. First thing I did was build cvsup in ports, cvsup ports and get portupgrade going. I've recompiled the kernel a few times tuning it to my hardware, getting scsi support for my ide cdrw amongst other things. I installed x.org from source and put gnome2 / gdm on top of it. The NVIDIA drivers are running accelerated and my Aureal Vortex2 sound card works. On top of that I have linux-flash running on Firebird 0.9.1, Evolution as a mail client and OpenOffice.org running happily. All in all it's working pretty good, but there are some issues :) When i su - root, the DISPLAY doesn't seem to get set properly and root can't open X windows, I can hack this in roots profile, but is there a better way of doing it? Speaking of root, i'm so used to Bash i'd like to switch to it for the root user - is there any gotchas with moving bash to /bin and updating /etc/shells to allow it? More media orientated questions, when using Gentoo during bootup before X started you could switch the console into VESA SVGA and have high resolution, including having a graphical splash screen to obscure the boot text before X came up - is there any way to do that. Another thing Gentoo had was a very flashy screen for GDM, and I assume KDM too - anyone knowof resources for doing something like that, even if it's just clip art of Beastie. Boot sequence, I have FreeBSD on the master drive and Win98 for gaming on the slave drive, but the boot loader never picked up Win98 during install what do I edit it get it to see it, or should I install an alternative loader such as Grub? I have my fat32 filesystem mounted at /mnt/windows: /dev/ad1s1 /mnt/windows msdos rw 0 0 But it mounts 700 as root, what should I use to change it to 775 root:wheel? Onto mplayer, got this installed with all the codecs, and installed the skins and fonts to get it graphical, but it just wont seem to start up with a gui, and yes i'm using gmplayer any suggestions? Another odd thing is after it finishes playing it messes up the console and somehow turns off local echo - anyone experienced this? DVD playback, neither mplayer nor xine seem to recognise my dvd, i did the kernel tweaks and devfs tweaks in the handbook: lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 5 Jul 9 20:14 /dev/cdrom -> acd0 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 3 Jul 9 20:14 /dev/dvd -> acd0 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 4 Jul 9 20:14 /dev/rdvd -> acd0 CDRW burning, what works well on FreeBSD? - I've been a bit spoiled by Nero on Windows so ideally want something as hassle free as that, used XCDRoast on Linux and it wasn't bad. Anyway thanks in advance, no doubt more questions will come up With Regards Kristian
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