Trying out PCBSD

Well today I decided to take a new BSD out for a ride. Namely PC-BSD. Supposedly its FreeBSD with a nicer front end. When I started it I decided to put it on VMWare 5 (which is a copy I got from the conference). I also set it up on 256MB and 1G of space, just to be on the conservative side for the time being. The start of installation process goes between text then graphical then text then graphical again. No biggie, its not like I am text-phobic. So on my first run through I left everything as defaults for now. What I ended up with was a non-working VM. So I tried again, but this time a bit more careful and not accepting defaults all the way. I noticed the problem. On my 1G machine, I had over 900MBs allocated to SWAP and about 24MBs allocated to "/". So from what it seems the "Automatic slicing" algorithm used by PC-BSD is somewhat flawed. I adjusted it so it is a bit saner manually. Unfortunately I did a booboo and also put in the PCBSD ISO image on the same drive as my VMWare image which is already running dangerously low on space. So I am living with that for a bit. There is no such thing as a minimal install on PCBSD, which is a good thing, the concept of minimal I think is too complicated for the general public. However, the 1G limit I put in seems to have taken its toll on the installation. So I am restarting the installation with 4G (VMWare default), but still 256MB of RAM. I moved the PC-BSD ISO to a different drive as well so I free up more room. PCBSD should have a hardware capacity check before doing stuff as well. Anyway. Now hopefully this is the last time I do the install. I am attempting the defaults again, I am guessing PCBSD would be a bit more sane now that it has 4G to work with. And as I predicted it did install. Now for the first boot up. Well the boot up sequence is the same as FreeBSD, text based. No biggie for me, I guess that will eventually go away. And eventually I see the KDE screen pop up, woo hoo! So first thing I do is download the ports collection into the new VM. Its not installed by default but at least they were nice enough to provide us with a supfile so I can do the port download in one command. Once the emulators part of the ports have been downloaded, I start up another command line session and install vmware-tools5. Then do the standard "make install clean". Which failed because it needed the X11 stuff which haven't been downloaded yet. Oh well just wait a bit more I guess. But once it downloaded, I just re-ran the install again. Now I am doing one more reboot to see if VMWare tools is in fact installed properly. Which it isn't. So I am doing the manual way which is to extract the files manually and run the installer. Unfortunately after doing that. I get an IOError on Open Display. Oh well. I guess I won't be using PC-BSD for now.