[thoffland]

OK, I'm really new to FreeBSD 4.11. Someone told me about it so I found an old Pentium 200mhz pc and loaded it. I've tried KDE, Gnome, Windowmaker and Blackbox... and I think I'm going with Blackbox.

Now my problem is that I've installed openoffice1.1.3 but cannot seem to find out how to make it run? Any tips?

Also, how do you get a run command on the menu bar?

And.. finally, does anyone know how to make desktop shortcuts? What about all those fancy gadgets that tell you CPU usage etc that are nice to look at?

I'm doing my best to learn myself, but I cant seem to figure this out.

Thanks!!

[optyk]

Welcome to the Screaming Electron ;)

Did you install openoffice from ports, pkg_add, or from the openoffice site? ports and pkg_add will install into /usr/local so you should find a launcher script(s) in /usr/local/bin if you used the FreeBSD package management.

As far as I remember, the menu bar in blackbox is more of a statusbar. To get menus you will need to run something like gnome-panel, kicker, or xfce-panel. It's easiest to just edit the desktop menu.

Desktop shortcuts will require another app like rox(/usr/ports/x11-fm/rox-filer). Blackbox is a minimalist window manager. It was designed primarily to draw window frames and not much more. It has several children, including waimea and fluxbox. You might want to check out fluxbox as it's still under active development and has quite alot of extended utility over blackbox.(/usr/ports/x11-wm/fluxbox)

Fancy gadgets can be had with gkrellm, karamba/superkaramba, and/or gdesklets. gkrellm is the easiest to use.

[Kernel_Killer]

Keep in mind that running OO on that system will take some time. Have a cup of coffee, go eat breakfast/lunch/dinner, and when you come back it should be loaded. You might want to stay away from most KDE, and GNOME apps since they will probably require the rest of your resources.

[molotov]

If all you need is word processing, Id suggest AbiWord over OO, just more lightweight.

[thoffland]

I used the "pkg_add -r openoffice" I'll reformat again and try Fluxbox instead. I have a few different window managers installed now, and last time I tried installing another new one I ran out of disk space. The pkg_deinstall doesn't seem to work for me, I'm sure I'm doing something wrong though.

Thanks for the tip... I'll be posting again soon with more questions. Is there a newbie section I should be using?

[thoffland]

Thanks!! I'll check it out!



If all you need is word processing, Id suggest AbiWord over OO, just more lightweight.

[bumbler]

Also, I believe you should replace "pkg_deinstall" with "pkg_delete". The "deinstall" business comes from using the ports tree to remove a package. The ports system is a whole 'nother animal.

[thoffland]

Thanks!! I found that I needed to use pkg_delete -r to delete the whole thing, but I haven't tried it yet... not sure yet but I think it will remove files that might be needed by something else. No big deal really since I'm learning. I've already reformatted this hard drive and reinstalled about 15 times!! :Eyecrazy:

Also, I believe you should replace "pkg_deinstall" with "pkg_delete". The "deinstall" business comes from using the ports tree to remove a package. The ports system is a whole 'nother animal.