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.
ProblemsKensington 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.