Recommended applications

Setting up a workstation

See our Complete_Workstation write-up on how to get a desktop system up and running.

Installation

You can get these by Installing ports or by Installing packages

Web Browsing

Firefox, Mozilla, links, lynx, dillo

Note that the latest version of Firefox in ports is 1.0.7 -- the latest release -- but that the latest package is 1.0.3, which is out of date and has had a few vulnerabilities announced for it. You can install it via pkg_add -r and then compile it while you use the older version.

Email

Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail, mutt, sylpheed, pine

Multimedia

Note that to get sound working under FreeBSD, you'll need to enable your sound card

beep-media-player, xmms, Mplayer, helix, realplayer, VLC

CD burning and ripping

X-CDRoast, cdrtools [burncd], k3b, grip

If you get any errors along the lines of "can't access /dev/acd0" from one of your CD reading/writing applications, your problem is probably the permissions on /dev/acd0 (or whatever your device is). A quick

chmod 644 /dev/acd0

will probably fix it.

Productivity

OpenOffice.org, AbiWord (No Java Required)