Upgrading to FreeBSD 3.2 etc

[Richard Smith]

Charles Brewster wrote:
> 
> There was some discussion a while back about "badge-ing" or whatever a UK
> oriented FreeBSD distribution set to raise a bit of beer money for the UK
> users goup ... IMHO something with a few mods to the install script which
> would deliver a user interface tailored to a user with a UK keyboard and
> some familiarity with MS keyboard shortcuts would be the ticket. Like an
> .emacs script for those non-fluent in lisp which lets you do shift+arrow
> highlighting and ctrl+c ctrl+v cut-and-pasting ... and which makes the
> backspace key work like it does on just about every other PC application I
> have ever used (including the version of emacs which ships with RedHat Linux).

What's an MS keyboard?

Set the UK keyboard by configuring syscons (one of the last things you
do before exiting /stand/sysinstall) and it will add the following line
to your /etc/rc.conf file:

	keymap="uk.iso"

The functionality you require for emacs can be added using cua-mode.el.
It's not part of the standard emacs distribution, but I didn't have too
much trouble finding it, and once you enable it in your dot.emacs file,
it gives you a standard CUA look and feel.

If you need a dot.emacs file to get it going I can send you one
tomorrow.

WRT the backspace key, you mustn't be too hard on BSD, as although
FreeBSD is _mainly_ for the PC, it's lineage was definitely not. And
many of the ports (eg. emacs & zsh) are targeted to any UNIX flavour.

Probably the simplest solution would be to construct a meta port, which
is a simple port that pulls in the ports that _you_ consider essential,
and add the configuration files _you_ need to make them work. At best,
you may find you favourite configuration available from sysinstall, at
worst, it would simplify your customization process, from one day to a
few minutes ;)

Richard.