# Quick E. Von Schnicky



## diortemew (Dec 30, 2020)

I love Fedora. Even more so being that I can have it installed and booted and working easily in half an hour; DE and all. As I transition into FreeBSD (installing it on my daily system as we speak), I will keep it on my laptop. It isn't gone, but I won't need it very often since I no longer travel as much as I used to. But this is my third install of FreeBSD in three days (on purpose). I wanted to learn a few steps and processes so I used an old Seagate drive I have decommissioned. Following the thread with the minimal FreeBSD install was sort of fun, so much that two days in a row I installed on the system. I learned a lot.

Now I am installing it for real; a little differently of course, I didn't want to sit here a third day straight as stuff compiled. My Nintendo Switch has made it worthwhile though, so I was not bored.

However, although easier, I have hit my third hour installing FreeBSD. It should finish soon enough though, the SSD is definitely proving more capable than the old 5400rpm from 12 years ago. This is insane. Please tell me there is an easier, faster, secure way of installing FreeBSD with development tools, KDE or similar, DE and ready to work. I don't want to wait over two hours for an install. It's simply not efficient once the training and learning period has ended. There is a way, right?


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## scottro (Dec 30, 2020)

Are you using ports? If so, that's a pretty slow way. Are you familiar with using packages? I would say setting up FreeBSD for me, working with openbox and using some saved config files, goes pretty quickly. about as fast as a Fedora install.  Actually a bit less, because RH and kin killed the textmode install (by severely limiting its choices) and now you have to go through a GUI whereas much of this can be done far more quickly with FreeBSD.
For example, base install for FreeBSD takes me about 6 minutes, more like 10 for Fedora. In both cases, minimal install. Then installing X and things I use takes maybe 20 minutes in each. Again, a bit longer in Fedora, because I have to get rid of Poettering bloat, for example, creating a modprobe.d/alsa.conf to get sound to work without pulseaudio, and have to install  brave-browser because Linux firefox won't work without pulse unless you compile it yourself, and I'm far too lazy. 

But I'm just picking at nits here. They probably take about the same amount of time, and my guess is that you're used to Fedora's way, and just have to get used to FreeBSD's way.  What is taking the two hours? I suspect that it may simply be unfamiliarity, vs. knowing Fedora well. (Also the fact that I'm sure there is a Fedora KDE SIG, but even so, it seems that installing with KDE shouldn't take that much longer if you're using pkg.)
Please note, I'm not putting down Fedora, I frequently make use of it, I'm just wondering what takes so much longer on FreeBSD.


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## diortemew (Dec 30, 2020)

scottro said:


> Are you using ports? If so, that's a pretty slow way. Are you familiar with using packages? I would say setting up FreeBSD for me, working with openbox and using some saved config files, goes pretty quickly. about as fast as a Fedora install.  Actually a bit less, because RH and kin killed the textmode install (by severely limiting its choices) and now you have to go through a GUI whereas much of this can be done far more quickly with FreeBSD.
> For example, base install for FreeBSD takes me about 6 minutes, more like 10 for Fedora. In both cases, minimal install. Then installing X and things I use takes maybe 20 minutes in each. Again, a bit longer in Fedora, because I have to get rid of Poettering bloat, for example, creating a modprobe.d/alsa.conf to get sound to work without pulseaudio, and have to install  brave-browser because Linux firefox won't work without pulse unless you compile it yourself, and I'm far too lazy.
> 
> But I'm just picking at nits here. They probably take about the same amount of time, and my guess is that you're used to Fedora's way, and just have to get used to FreeBSD's way.  What is taking the two hours? I suspect that it may simply be unfamiliarity, vs. knowing Fedora well. (Also the fact that I'm sure there is a Fedora KDE SIG, but even so, it seems that installing with KDE shouldn't take that much longer if you're using pkg.)
> Please note, I'm not putting down Fedora, I frequently make use of it, I'm just wondering what takes so much longer on FreeBSD.


Apparently it was compiling. Then after a buffer error I restarted and it continues from where it left off. Then I got the buffer error again. That's when it started over, then as it suggested, only took 15 minutes. It was supposed to be from packages from the get-go. After some backtracking, I believe a cat jumping on the keyboard was the culprit. Four hours later and I can finally config Xorg (I ran into an error, which is kind boggling in it's own right, I installed all drivers and such so it should be working). I am so glad that compiling stopped, it was brutal.


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## mark_j (Dec 30, 2020)

diortemew said:


> I love Fedora. Even more so being that I can have it installed and booted and working easily in half an hour; DE and all. As I transition into FreeBSD (installing it on my daily system as we speak), I will keep it on my laptop. It isn't gone, but I won't need it very often since I no longer travel as much as I used to. But this is my third install of FreeBSD in three days (on purpose). I wanted to learn a few steps and processes so I used an old Seagate drive I have decommissioned. Following the thread with the minimal FreeBSD install was sort of fun, so much that two days in a row I installed on the system. I learned a lot.
> 
> Now I am installing it for real; a little differently of course, I didn't want to sit here a third day straight as stuff compiled. My Nintendo Switch has made it worthwhile though, so I was not bored.
> 
> However, although easier, I have hit my third hour installing FreeBSD. It should finish soon enough though, the SSD is definitely proving more capable than the old 5400rpm from 12 years ago. This is insane. Please tell me there is an easier, faster, secure way of installing FreeBSD with development tools, KDE or similar, DE and ready to work. I don't want to wait over two hours for an install. It's simply not efficient once the training and learning period has ended. There is a way, right?


I just installed 13 in ~10 minutes with xfce and nothing much else. Hours is just insane. If your system is slow building ports stick to packages as scottro says.


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## diortemew (Dec 30, 2020)

Yeah, I am not there yet. How is xfce on BSD? Also, do you have a preferred install guide outside of the documentation? One that does it right? 

Can't friggin' sleep; depressed, sad, and numb. Lost a dear friend this evening. He was taken too soon.


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## mark_j (Dec 30, 2020)

The guide has problems? What's your issue?
Xfce is probably the same as on linux, but that's just a guess. I don't use kde but i understand it's way larger than xfce so it will take a little longer, but not hours.


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## Alexander88207 (Dec 30, 2020)

diortemew said:


> Lost a dear friend this evening. He was taken too soon.



I am sorry to read this now 

To install XFCE i recommend to install the following packages :

- x11-wm/xfce4 - This the xfce4 metapackage that includes the desktop (panel, notifications, editor etc..) but its pretty clean!
- thunar - Filemanager
- xfce4-screensaver - Screensaver and locker
- xfce4-screenshooter-plugin - take screenshoots
- lightdm - The displaymanager
- lightdm-gtk-greeter and lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings - Greeter and settings for lightdm

After installing these you only have to enable lightdm by putting `dbus_enable="YES"` `lightdm_enable="YES"` in `/etc/rc.conf`

If you dont want to use a displaymanager you can also use `startxfce4` to start xfce from commandline.

There is a handbook entry for install some Desktop Enviroments but its a bit outdated (/proc is not needed anymore) and they recommend to use the big metapackages like kde5 or gnome3 which installs their full stacks with games etc.. which i guess nobody need them.









						Chapter 5. The X Window System
					

This chapter describes how to install and configure Xorg on FreeBSD, which provides the open source X Window System used to provide a graphical environment




					www.freebsd.org


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## SirDice (Dec 30, 2020)

diortemew said:


> Please tell me there is an easier, faster, secure way of installing FreeBSD with development tools, KDE or similar, DE and ready to work. I don't want to wait over two hours for an install.


A DE is not part of FreeBSD. Those are all third party software. The installation of FreeBSD itself only takes a couple of minutes. Installing software from ports is a complicated and time-consuming way of installing anything. You typically don't do this on Fedora, you use yum, which installs packages. Use packages on FreeBSD.









						Chapter 4. Installing Applications: Packages and Ports
					

FreeBSD provides two complementary technologies for installing third-party software: the FreeBSD Ports Collection, for installing from source, and packages, for installing from pre-built binaries




					www.freebsd.org


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## drhowarddrfine (Dec 30, 2020)

diortemew said:


> Following the thread with the minimal FreeBSD install


So often I read of people finding some thread somewhere and then complain of troubles. The FreeBSD Handbook is there for a reason.

If Installation is taking longer than 10 to 20 minutes, you're doing something wrong.


diortemew said:


> Apparently it was compiling.


And there it is.


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