> I've never really put a lot of time into turning FreeBSD into a solid work > station which I'm sure it's more than able to be.
certainly the best I've used on the desktop > For the most part all the workstations will be used for the usuall, > web,email, irc and local development. Noted, I'll reply regarding these specifically. > Cutting the long story short for people who use FreeBSD as a desktop > currently, what version is recommended at the moment for such a task. Almost assuredly 5.3 woudl be the way to go. Someone else mentioned this earlier. It's the version that will allow you to easily upgrade from stable version to stable version. > Most of the boxes have fairly good specs, 1.9GHZ plenty of hdd space and > lots of RAM. > > Can people recommend some nice window managers, email clients etc ? Of course. I can at least tell you what I have and haven't tried/used. Web: I use konqueror for most of my browsing, but understand that I'm very much in the minority when I do so. Further gmail is not supported in it. Firefox is the only other browser that I use currently in FreeBSd. I've used Opera and Galeon/Skipstone without any real hatred. Email: Because I don't try to deviate too much from the kde desktop currently, (tracking development) I've been using kmail. It has a few features missing and one of them specifically (delete only deleted messages from server) does make me use thunderbird sometimes. I've not tried evolution, although I hear only good things about it. IRC: I recommend no client more heartily than irssi. IMHO, irc isn't something that can be easily (or at least hasn't been as I've seen it) graphicalised. I used XChat for a while, but when I used it it was relatively unstable. Also, being able to use irssi in conjunction with screen makes IRC much easier to keep logs. Local Dev: This depends heavily on what type of development you are doing. vim/kvim and gcc/g++ is my choice environment for C and C++ programming. It's not a full-flavoured environment, but I find nothing that I can't do with those tools. If you do Java programming, I recommend giving netbeans a try. If you are trying to do local graphical applications, kDevelop isn't so bad. My usual choice of environment on beefy systems (>= 1.0 ghz 686's) I tend to use KDE. I like the configurability and it is more full featured than I'd ever need. A /lot/ of people like to use something substantially lighter (RAM usage and login time for reasons). One of the solutions I've found that is very much acceptable to me is a combination of OpenBox and Kicker (from kde). Gives me a full-featured bar and system tray coupled with a VERY light window manager. I would think the best possible suggestion as you embark is to try a bunch. Fluxbox, Blackbox, Openbox, Gnome, XFCE4, KDE, IceWM, and more. It never hurts to look at alternatives. I hope this helps. -- If I write a signature, my emails will appear more personalised. _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
