On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 7:50 PM, Henry Olyer <henry.ol...@gmail.com> 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 <mnorw...@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
Have either of you had a look at PC-BSD? http://www.pcbsd.org/ It's getting better with each release...oh, and it's based on FreeBSD too :) -Brandon _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
