# starting windowing.



## nixietube (Jun 10, 2014)

I am a newbie to FreeBSD; I burned the DVD image, booted it, but cannot see how to start the windowing system. The command `startx` is not found.  With a 2.2 GB image, how many hoops have to be jumped through?.


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## kpa (Jun 10, 2014)

There can be quite a few hoops to be jumped trough if you're not familiar with anything remotely like FreeBSD. I'd suggest you try PC-BSD first because it is much more newbie-friendly than bare FreeBSD:

http://www.pcbsd.org/


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## wblock@ (Jun 10, 2014)

FreeBSD is more minimalist than many other operating systems.  X is available, but not installed by default.  The majority of the 2.2G image you downloaded is binary packages, likely including X.

As @kpa suggests, PC-BSD is an easy way to get a system with all the desktop configuration already complete.  If you'd like to do it yourself, the Handbook describes installation and configuration of X: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x11.html.


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## chrbr (Jun 10, 2014)

Dear @nixietube,
if I am not wrong `startx` acts as a front end for `xinit` and should be provided by x11/xinit.


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## wblock@ (Jun 10, 2014)

Yes, but X generally depends on some other things also.


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