First look at FreeBSD 7.0

I remember well the first time I attempted to set up FreeBSD 4.x as a desktop system. After configuring the X window and launching KDE, I was greeted with something that only a computing masochist could find enjoyable - no mouse or sound, unsightly jagged fonts, lack of a graphical package manager and other configuration tools... It took hours of searching and following "geeky" documentation before I was able to load the correct kernel modules for the USB mouse, install prettier fonts and set up anti-aliasing - all by editing obscure configuration files in Vim. Needless to say, the first impressions weren't good. Despite an obviously elegant system with a large number of packages available for installation, the tedium of setting it up as a desktop system was discouraging, to say the least.

So when FreeBSD 7.0 was finally released last week, I decided to make a new attempt at installing and configuring FreeBSD for the desktop. Have things improved? Would I be able to tweak the FreeBSD of today into a desktop system without wasting hours of searching and command line configuring? These were the questions going through my mind while booting the installation CD on my test box - an older Pentium 4 1.4 GHz machine with 384 MB of RAM, two 120 GB hard disks, an NVIDIA GForce4 graphics card, a generic LCD monitor with a maximum resolution of 1280x1024 pixels, integrated sound and network chips that are recognised by most Linux distributions, a USB mouse, a DVD burner... all pretty standard if somewhat outdated hardware.

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