30 days of Linux Challenge Free BSD & LMDE - Page 2

That's kind of where I'm at presently. VM's to me are sort of like when I got my Asus Transformer Prime...It took me awhile to work it into my daily work flow to really be useful. I still end up doing a lot of things on my phone because it's been in my life for years and the tablet hasn't. At the moment getting a *nix OS up and running is more of a priority than learning a new set of tools.

Good to know things like Ableton work in a VM. The only reason I'm not running a dedicated Nix box is because I don't have the parts for my new gaming rig in yet. Once that happens my sig rig will become dedicated to Nix and sit between the new "main" rig and the G5. The long term goal is to minimize Window's role in my life to just gaming and use Nix for everything else, just may take a bit to get there.

At some point I might look more closely at the examples of the major base forms of Linux and dabble in them but for now I've gone with FreeBSD. BSD and CentOS are the installs that have lived the longest on my *nix box till it's recent demise. I did BSD because it just kind of called to me (Don't life y'all) and CentOS was for the fact it behaves like RHEL and I was toying with the idea of RHEL certs at one point.


That was sort of the logic I had when I decided on dual booting originally, though I can see the logic in making a few Live CD's with different DE/WM's to dabble into without having to commit to a full install.


Current State

I took the plunge and I have a dual boot system, mostly. Primary disk is Win XP64 2nd physical disk is FreeBSD 9. I can choose which way I boot by bringing up the boot device selector during boot up and selecting the drive I want to boot form. I haven't gotten a boat loader on the primary (XP64) drive yet though I might at some point. As I might have mentioned in the OP that I haven't had a *nix GUI installed in some years as I've worked mostly via SSHing in via Putty and running around in CLI only. My next step is to getting X Windows up and running so I have some form of GUI to use. I'm noticing BSD doesn't seem to have an option for X as part of the initial install like it did at one time. This isn't a major setback or deterrent as between FreeBSD's site, google and many a desperate question or two on a few forums I can overcome most hurdles without too much hair loss . While this might be the more complicated approach I'm thinking it might be the more rewarding in the long run is to try the suggestion of setting up just a WM and then adding in the additional elements I might find useful/desired eg. dock/launcher, panel, etc. I have a funny feeling my tablet is about to see a lot more usage in this process than it normally gets around the home office normally. Feel free to let me know if I'm about to leap off a cliff and face plant or something