Playing with FreeBSD 12

So my use case is run FreeBSD in VirtualBox in Windows. The first experiment ended up in failure, but not because I was using Windows, rather because I can’t get the X server to behave. So I will need to attempt this again. I will say that my goal is to do 3D graphics and game development.

However, I did discover some neat things I can use this OS for. For instance, I am rediscovering WindowMaker. I thought it was cool that the PlayStation 2 Linux Kit used it as the default window manager. I used it often in the 1990’s. It still looks good. But, it doesn’t work out of the box for any kind of real work.

There are several packages I am trying: redshift, compton, and xdg-user-dirs, xscreensaver. Anyways, here is my current pkg install command list.

pkg install bash tmux htop vim emacs w3m wget curl nano
pkg install xorg slim windowmaker enlightenment wmakerconf
pkg install redshift compton xdg-user-dirs xscreensaver xeyes
pkg install firefox gimp
pkg install ...

I will note that I find it ironic that it takes 1 gigabyte to do the first line which are supposed to be command line utilities! By using emacs-nox and vim-console, it goes down to 279 MiB instead. These are the dockapps I installed for WindowMaker.

pkg install wmcpuload wmclock wmnetload wmsystemtray wmtop wmmemload
pkg install inconsolata-ttf

The Xdefaults file needs to be updated so that xterm doesn’t look too small. I use the following settings:

*xterm*foreground: #cfcfcf
*xterm*background: #000000
*xterm*font: xft:Inconsolata:size=16

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