The FreeBSD 6.2 Crash Course

FreeBSD As a Desktop Operating System

Because of the wide array of desktop programs available through Ports, and because Nvidia makes an official, hardware-accelerated video driver available for it, FreeBSD is the best candidate for a desktop operating system among the various BSD derivatives.

The fact of FreeBSD's desktop potential is reinforced by the two projects that seek to enhance and customize it for desktop use: PC-BSD and DesktopBSD. By the same token, the fact that these three projects are necessary to appropriately customize FreeBSD for desktop use is a testament to the poor default condition of the operating environment. If you're serious about making FreeBSD into a regular desktop operating system, or if you plan to use this machine in production, you'll have a much easier time using PC-BSD instead of trying to customize FreeBSD. With that in mind, this section will tell you how to configure every aspect of FreeBSD that is important to desktop computing. If you're building a server or network appliance with FreeBSD, you'll probably want to skip most or all of this section.

Installing and Configuring X.org

Hopefully you installed the X.org package sets during the initial installation. If not, you can install X.org through the Ports system in the /usr/ports/x11/xorg/ directory. This is actually a "meta-port" of several different X.org packages. It can take anywhere from 10 minutes to more than an hour to install everything, depending on the speed of your computer and Internet ...