Configuring BSD as an average Home-user OS

Yup, you read that right, today i’ve finished configuring my FreeBSD 5.4-Releaseas an average home-user box.

Previously, I had only a minimal FreeBSD 4.6 (includes gcc) inside my pc to test out my apps before releasing to public, and I’ve no intention of using it seriously because I’m so used to GNU utils instead of BSD ones.

I’ve considered doing this as a challenge for myself, I’m getting bored of testing various GNU/Linux distro that i’ve decided to use FreeBSD seriously for a change.

Well, what would i do? Having installed a barebone FreeBSD system made me thinking, what should i do now?. Firstly, I jot down things that i like to do mostly with my pc, work from there.

That kind of thinking narrows down to coding with c, self-taught php-class, movie player (mpeg4,dvd capable), music player (mp3 player), cd-writing, p2p, and of course internet connection.

FreeBSD Xwindows environment setting change a bit from the last time i use it. Seems that now I need to configure xdm manually, which is not my area of expertise, Luckily the FreeBSD Handbook came in handy in these situation, although i had quite a bump at setting up my desired WM.

Next stop, was setting up my internet connection using PPPoE (that’s Streamyx broadband), which again left me clueless. I know that I can connect to the internet quickly by enabling dhcp-client, but hey, that’s not quite fun for me. Luckily, the “/etc/share/examples/” directory have the ppp.conf sample which I merrily configured my internet connection.

After i’ve settled up the internet connection, everything else is a piece of cake. I’ve surf the web for the Freebsd ports collection and install all things that i required there, again I only have minor hiccups here where I had to use “cvsup” to download things that i cant acquire from pkg_add command.

All in all, it was fun experience setting up FreeBSD box for my average home-user need. I cant wait to start using *BSD now for a change. ;)

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