Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2002 12:00:16 +0930 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Peter Leftwich <Hostmaster@Video2Video.Com> Cc: Michael Wells <mwvw@adelphia.net>, FreeBSD LIST <FreeBSD-Questions@FreeBSD.Org> Subject: What do we need in a FreeBSD desktop? (was: Peter heads back to M$FT WinBloze [support groups]) Message-ID: <20020728023016.GA51076@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <20020726210341.N20468-100000@earl-grey.cloud9.net> References: <00d301c23504$9bbe0c60$0a01a8c0@mswolf> <20020726210341.N20468-100000@earl-grey.cloud9.net>
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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
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