Albright Builds a Computer (31)

9 Name: Albright!LC/IWhc3yc : 2006-06-27 04:38 ID:erMTJ0cy

>>8: What?

Okay, to continue. Unix (and Linux) by itself is a text-only operating system. It's fully functional, but it's not a lot of fun to use. To remedy this, there have been various graphical interfaces that have developed that allow folks to control their computers and applications using a mouse-driven interface of windows, icons, buttons, and so on. The two most popular systems out there are the K Desktop Environment (KDE) and GNOME. It's easy to confuse KDE and GNOME with actual operating systems, but really they're more like "shells" for the real guts of the operating system; they make it look pretty and easier to use, but they don't actually power any of the programs. There are programs which are specifically written for KDE and those specifically written for GNOME, but as both of them can run each other's applications with few complications, choosing between KDE and GNOME can be merely a matter of personal preference. PC-BSD comes installed with KDE, along with many KDE applications, including a web browser (Konqueror, a quite competent browser which shares guts with the Mac's Safari browser), text editors (but no real word processing apps), image viewers, IRC, email and instant messaging programs, media players, and a spattering of simple games -- pretty much everything necessary to get some decent work done with the computer out of the box. PC-BSD's version of KDE is set up to look disturbingly identical to Windows XP's "Fisher-Price" look, but it's rather customizable. It even has an eqivilent of the Start menu called the K menu, which here has a stylized icon of a devil's horned head. (The mascot of FreeBSD is a devil.)

As I mentioned above, I had picked up a wi-fi card, so one of my first goals was to get that working so I didn't have to be tethered to an ethernet cable to get in the internet. There was no support for my wi-fi card out of the box; the drivers just weren't there. Information on getting it to work was scattered about in a few different places on PC-BSD's forums, FAQs, and documention programs, but I managed to piece things together. Fortunately, there's a FreeBSD project called Project Evil which is essentially a program which is capable of "porting" Windows drivers to something FreeBSD can use. However, this program requires that I first download the source code of the FreeBSD kernel (the corest of core parts of the operating system), which is not installed by PC-BSD by default. It's easy to download, however: K menu: Computer: PC-BSD Settings: System, click the Tasks tab, click Fetch System Source. Of course, it'll require an internet connection (via my computer's ethernet port in this case) to work.

Once that was done, I had to copy the Windows drivers to my hard drive, then run the ndisgen program at the command line as root. I also had to do an uncomfortable amount of config file editing in order to get the wi-fi card's settings set up. In the end, I got it to work perfectly, but it was a bit of hassle. I think it's something that could definitely see some improvement if PC-BSD is in fact going to become a user-friendly operating system.

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