FreeBSD Workstation

The PC media bandwagon was forced to admit some time ago that Linux is generally a better operating system than Windows. Someone came up with an answer to this and everyone else has been repeating it endlessly: Linux may be better for servers, but Linux on the desktop is seriously lacking. To a certain extent, this is true (although this is often just a matter of looking at things from a Microsoft-centric universe).

I'm not really a big Linux fan. However, Linux doesn't suck quite as badly as it did ten years ago. Furthermore, I'm happy to see Linux succeed if it means more momentum for *nix and less for Microsoft.

FreeBSD is my Unix of choice. I run it on servers and workstations, and I am quite happy with it. I won't go into the reasons for my choice here. However, FreeBSD's out-of-the-box support for workstation services is rather rough around the edges, and a bit of customization often needs to be done to get things working. It is this kind of thing that I want to cover here.

Update: Since I started writing this, many integration issues have been cleaned up. In other words, many things work out of the box that I used to have to figure out the hard way. Corespondingly, I need to clean up some of these documents, and rewrite others in the form of a how-to. Still, we've come a long way, which means I have moved on to new challenges. Stay tuned for more exiting stuff.

Problems

Email
Kensington Export Mouse USB Trackball
Flash Plugin for Mozilla
Java Plugin for Mozilla
Yahoo Instant Messenger

Graphical Login: xdm, gdm
Window Managers, Desktops
USB, Firewire (where did my firewire document go?)
WinModems (give up now)
NAT, Tunnels (VPN) and Networking at Home
DHCP
Office Suites
Audio/Sound
Palm Syncronization

If there is something related to this topic which is not documented here, please contact me and I will consider working up a document for it or, at the very least, trying to answer your question.