Rebuilding FreeBSD

I had this installed, messed up the boot blocks with an emulation layer, fixed the bootblocks with NEtBSD and fscheck, and have reinstalled successfully now. If you're not patient, I suggest you walk away.

FreeBSD requires that you know your hardware, amount of RAM, amount of usuable RAM (a board of 256 may only have 220), processor type (PC means "personal computer. If I have a macintosh ppc and a ultraSPARC workstation and both are in my house, they are PCs), an internet hook up or the collection of software and dependencies on disks or a local network.

It took about two hours to reconfigure, partition, write, setup networking, and install the ports. This time also incuded adding users.

Configuring X took about thirty minuyes. Extra configuring of X- desktop manager- took another forty five minutes.
Source building for KDE took 16 hours. I did a binary of GNOMe and a source build of XFCE4.
It will take another hour to completetely congigure the sound and the same for printing.

Now, you may wonder why anyone would spend so much time on a system when they can get one already installed or on a set of disks.
here are my reasons: FreeBSD and the other BSD distributions are custom builds. Everything that you have is what you choose.
The BSD distributions use wheel as the base root and su for user access.
Security is customized.
I have 256M RAM and 224M is usually available. Compared to LInux, the performanve is 50 to 75% better. Compared to windows XP, the performance is 200% better.
You can use a text editor to fix your system. It's a downside in that you need to know where things are located. An upside because you don't need special programs to access and modify programs. There are even text interfaces for binary.
Execution of graphics programs. Since fewer resources are being used, memory won't be stolen from the system processes or the rendering engine itself.

Emulation. you can run linux or an older copy of windows on the box.