There is no reason to not just use FreeBSD with
sysutils/desktop-installer.
Or, use the
Skunk Installer for FreeBSD.
This is a completely different installer, intended to bootstrap
SkunkOS onto computers.
It starts where the "bsdinstall" FreeBSD installer, sadly, leaves off.
It keeps the look and feel of bsdinstall, updates the system, then autodetects and autoconfigures your hardware for Xorg and working suspend/resume, installs and configures desktops and applications of your choice, and finally starts up X, ready-to-use.
I would like to know beforehand which files sysutils/desktop-installer will modify ? Is this possible ?
Like with
Jasons' desktop-installer, just look at the
source.
The Skunk Installer is written in Perl, not in sh. Thus it is much easier to modify configuration files.
In short:
It just does the necessary modifications in system files. It creates a xorg.conf tailored to your hardware, and dispatches all the postwork fiddling mentioned in the pkg messages.
You know: The user needs a really-ready-to-use system. Requiring her/him to do manual postconfiguration is not acceptable.
So I suspect the Skunk Installer pokes around even more in these files...
You could try out the Skunk Installer in a throw-away virtual machine before deciding whether to use it on bare metal.
Not easily, although from what I recall there's thoughtful, careful logging.
The Skunk Installer log is found in
/var/log/bootie.log. It is not yet perfect. In some places it could be a bit more verbose, in others a little bit less. But this and other details will be better fine-tuned with the next alpha release 0.0.5.
BTW, the Skunk Cloner, which makes cloning FreeBSD systems really easy, is starting its internal test phase. First alpha will be released soon.