Problems with FreeBSD Virtual Machine

So I finally got the download of FreeBSD to work, but after installing it as a VM, I can't get into the GUI. It just boots to the installation menu, and then has a console login, but after I log in it is still a console. The one I downloaded was 8.2 amd64, the "FreeBSD-8.2-RELEASE-amd64-disc1.iso"

What am I missing?

 

Nothing. FreeBSD does not come with a full GUI, only the X Windowing System (the graphical server that GUIs run on top of). You have to install stuff with 'pkg_add -r'. If you're new to FreeBSD, probably the first thing you should install is pkg_search, the utility for searching the package repository.

Be warned though - FreeBSD is not easy to use. Compatibility with recent hardware is poor, stuff that works well on Linux (e.g. HAL based automounting) may not work correctly on FreeBSD, and the whole system basically has to be configured from scratch. None of this is really the FreeBSD developers' fault (FreeBSD is not popular on the desktop, is really intended for server use, and is largely ignored by the FreeDesktop.org developers), but it still tends to present a problem for newcomers.

 

Oh okay. I saw it on distrowatch and it seemed cool but I wasn't aware of the stuff you just told me. Thank you.

 

PC-BSD is based on it, but includes KDE (more desktop environments in beta) and is made to be user friendly.

 

Note that PC-BSD also occupies the better part of a DVD.

I was going to post a whole thing about distros that are BSD-like, or let you build a system up from something minimal, but it really sounds like that's not what you want. Probably the best choice for now would be OpenSuSE or Ubuntu (or Kubuntu if you like KDE).