FreeBSD 7.3-release update: It's going better than I expected

I've been running FreeBSD for more than a week now - first 8.0-release, now 7.3-release (with packages for some reason coming from 7-stable), and as the title of this post says, it's going very well.

I started with the idea that I'd run the full GNOME desktop with all the apps I used in Debian, and I pretty much have that setup.

But late last week I set up the Fvwm2 window manager - and just like in any other Unix-like OS, running something like Fvwm2 (or Fluxbox, which I also have in this install) does consume fewer resources than GNOME. Not that GNOME is by any means slow in FreeBSD on this hardware (Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 with 1.2 GHz Celeron, 1 GB RAM).

But I could see in the top utility that Fvwm was easier on both CPU and RAM.

Not that I'm doing everything in Fvwm2. I'm working right now and am doing so in GNOME.

As I alluded to above, I'm not sure whether or not it has been the case since I did the install of 7.3-release, but it looks like when I use pkg_add to install binary packages that my system is pulling from the 7-stable repository and not the 7.3-release repo.

I noticed because I've had to "force" a couple of packages to install due to slight differences in the versions of dependencies that are already part of the system. I'm unsure whether to a) change PACKAGESITE to point to 7.3-release, b) upgrade the system itself from 7.3-release to 7-stable, c) upgrade to 8.0-release or 8-stable, or d) don't do anything.

At the moment everything is working, so I'm leanign toward answer "d" - doing nothing.

I even solved my X problems, some of which were caused by my starting X with the command startx in a root shell rather than my user shell.

Once I figured that out and then invoked DPMS in my xorg.conf:

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier	"Configured Monitor"
	Option		"DPMS"

Then I had my screensaver issues solved. The computer goes into regular screensaver mode, then eventually the system turns the screen off entirely, and I can get back from either screensaver mode by moving the mouse.

I even installed a few ports, as opposed to precompiled binary packages, which I generally prefer due to the speed with which they are installed, my own laziness, and my worry about running out of disk space (I'm working with 20 GB total here ....).

I built gThumb from ports because I needed IPTC capability baked in. The ports system in FreeBSD lets you choose this option from a handy menu when you are building the application. I've since found out that gThumb in Debian is built with IPTC support - which is how I discovered that it's exactly what I need for Web photo editing - but gThumb in Ubuntu leaves IPTC out, rendering it mostly useless for my work.

It's great that in FreeBSD building the package from source the way I want/need it is so easy to do.

In order to get CUPS printing working, I had to reinstall a couple of packages for which I used ports.

So I have a nice setup here with GNOME 2.28, Fvwm2, Fluxbox if I decide to use it, all the apps I generally use, and I have all of my user files on this system now. I kept my 3+GB of Thunderbird mail on a USB stick that I can access from this machine, and I've been using Gmail as my main mail client, through which I'm filtering a whole bunch of mail.

I never thought POP-ing down mail with Thunderbird was the best solution, and having to back up that Thunderbird mail, which always takes an eon or two, made me want to continue in that mode even less.

I know Google is targeting ads to me based on what's in my e-mail and documents, but the service is just too good for me to pass it up at this juncture.

I should probably mention again that I do have Java working in my Web browsers, I have Flash 9 installed, even though it's problematic resources-wise (and I have it turned off in Firefox for that reason, leaving Epiphany as my "Flash browser").

Overall, many more things work than don't in this FreeBSD 7.3-release installation, so I think I'll be sticking with it for a while.