[bumbler]

I was doing considerable testing on CentOS for use with clients migrating to Open Source. Nice, but it's not FreeBSD, of course. When that was done, I decided to do a clean install on the dedicated FreeBSD harddrive. I also had just added a new RAM stick for a total half-gig to support my Celeron 1.8Ghz.

I only put on the core system with sources, plus Pine/Pico cause I'm too wimpy to learn Vi. Then I did the CVSup and buildworld routine. I chose to optimize on pentium4 and -O2. Then I began adding pieces from the current ports tree, letting it take care of dependencies itself. Very educational. I went for the KDE desktop. The only thing that ignored my optimization flags was OpenOffice 1.1.5.

I'm pretty happy with it. Everything is snappy as it should be, and the display is crystal clear. 3D accel works slightly better than it did with unoptimized xorg. On my Intel i845 chipset, I get about 280fps on glxgears, which is much better than the previous 210fps. I know, not a professional benchmarking tool, but at least indicative. I've not read of anyone going quite this route, and found it worth doing for my own purposes.

I plan to write it up for another Clueless User article. Comments? Recommendations for improvement?

[bsdjunkie]

I only put on the core system with sources, plus Pine/Pico cause I'm too wimpy to learn Vi.

Shame on you =) My first Unix course I had in college, our Professor made us use vi to write out the vi man page. Needless to say, I picked it up pretty quick =p

[bumbler]

Actually, what I wrote was self-deprecating humor. I despise Vi, and consider it so badly broken I'd never use it for any purpose except as an example of poorly designed software. Nor is that a vote for Emacs. When all you need is a simple text editor, modes and visible buffers are a horrendous waste of human resources. When it comes to simple configuration editing, Pico is still more than most people need. Only coders enjoy all the extra stuff. I'm content to let them have all the Vi and Emacs they want, as well as my share. Ordinary users have no business even installing them, and ordinary desktop users is what I'm all about.

Since I don't take myself too seriously, I'll gladly take all the lumps that such a screed will incite. :-)

[bsdjunkie]

hmm, I think we have a new poll option....

vi vs emacs lives again.