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.

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This will be a quick walk through for installation of a FreeBSD 7.x system. The idea is to install a minimal system, recompile the base system with optimizations specific to the architecture, and then install all remaining software from ports (ala Gentoo Linux, except you get a stable BSD system :). This is more of a checklist for future reference and does not replace the FreeBSD Handbook and relevant man pages. Without further adieu…

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