undertakingyou

OK, I know that it has been a while. But I just set up a VMWare server on my ubuntu machine and I think that I will keep testing some stuff out. The latest victim: FreeBSD. I know, it isn’t linux. I know, I am crazy. I really thought that I could like it. I based that off of the opinion of a friend. Wow, not going there again!

To start the installer. Not to pretty, in standard text based installer layout. But the menu system was a little confusing. It wasn’t that there were super convoluted menus, just that there were a ton of them. I mean really, a ton. So I get through that and I restart after it gets everything that it needs. And I get a shell prompt. I pause, I told it that I wanted the X window system. So I log in and I am using the dvorak keyboard layout. Everything a normal shell. I do startx, and I am now faced with a primative looking GUI with what looks like the fluxbox window manager, and I see three shells and a clock. No menu, no status bar, nothing. I find that if I kill the shell labeled “logon” I kill X altogether. And that I can’t really resize these windows easily. The only thing that I can start from the “menu” is another terminal. That is ok, I can use the terminal. But my shell is /bin/sh, not /bin/bash. I have a dozen commands and that is it. I could do nothing. I tried to install something, like bash or wdm. I can’t us the SU command so that I have root privileges.

It may have been a short test but it spoke volumes. I will try it again someday. After I learn another shell and decide I don’t need to use my computer in an interactive way. Until then, I don’t think that I will use any BSD version for a while.