This is the second installment of getting FreeBSD up and running with minimum hassle. Do check out the first part.

In this installment we will setup the firewall, Xorg, and basic multimedia and development ports: all the basic essentials to make use of your desktop machine. The ports list is very skimp on purpose: since there is no way I can think of everything most of us use daily, I’m not even going to try. But if you can follow along and get this much setup, you will have absolutely no problem finding and installing all the actual applications you can’t live without.

Firewall

Setup a firewall. I prefer the OpenBSD firewall pf which is also ported to FreeBSD. See also:

• http://home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu/pf.html
• http://www.bgnett.no/~peter/pf/en/long-firewall.html
• http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/index.html

# vi /etc/rc.conf
  >> pf_enable="YES"                 # Enable PF (load module if required)
  >> pf_rules="/etc/pf.conf"         # rules definition file for pf
  >> pf_flags=""                     # additional flags for pfctl startup
  >> pflog_enable="YES"              # start pflogd(8)
  >> pflog_logfile="/var/log/pflog"  # where pflogd should store the logfile
  >> pflog_flags=""                  # additional flags for pflogd startup

# cp /usr/share/examples/pf/pf.conf $LOCALROOT/etc/
# ln -s $LOCALROOT/etc/pf.conf /etc/
# vi /etc/pf.conf
# /etc/rc.d/pf start
# /etc/rc.d/pflog start
# pfctl -f /etc/pf.conf

Xorg

Install ports:

• x11/xorg
• graphics/dri
• graphics/mesa-demos
• x11-fonts/urwfonts-ttf
• x11/kde3 or x11/gnome2 or x11/xmonad/ or …

# Xorg -configure
# mv -i /root/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf
# vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf
  >> Load "freetype"
  >> FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/urwfonts-ttf"
  >> FontPath     "/usr/local/share/apps/konsole/fonts"
  >> FontPath     "/usr/local/share/fonts/ampspsfont/type1"
  >> FontPath     "/usr/local/share/fonts/cmpsfont/type1"
# vi /usr/local/etc/fonts/local.conf
  >> <dir>/usr/local/share/apps/konsole/fonts</dir>

# fc-cache -f
# cd /usr/ports/x11-fonts/webfonts
# make WITH_MSLICENSE="YES" install
# make clean
# vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
  >> FontPath "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/webfonts/"

Post-Install

If you are easily corrupted by power, add yourself to the wheel group.

# pw groupmod wheel -m $USER

Make sure you have the following entry in /etc/fstab:

# linproc /compat/linux/proc linprocfs rw 0 0

For some reason, FreeBSD does not have a cron job to update the locate database. I tend to use this a lot, so I setup a cronjob to run updatedb daily at 4:05:

# crontab -e
  >> 5 4 * * * /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb

Additional Ports

Multimedia:

• audio/amarok
• multimedia/mplayer
• multimedia/win32-codecs
• net-p2p/ktorrent

Utilities:

• security/sudo
• sysutils/htop
• archivers/unrar
• archivers/unzip

Development:

• editors/emacs-devel
• lang/python
• lang/ghc
• devel/darcs

Databases:

• database/postgresql83-server

Comments

Are there additional steps you like to take with new installations?
Perhaps I’ve missed something important?