starting windowing.

[nixietube]

I am a newbie to FreeBSD; I burned the DVD image, booted it, but cannot see how to start the windowing system. The command startx is not found. With a 2.2 GB image, how many hoops have to be jumped through?.

 

[kpa]

There can be quite a few hoops to be jumped trough if you're not familiar with anything remotely like FreeBSD. I'd suggest you try PC-BSD first because it is much more newbie-friendly than bare FreeBSD:

http://www.pcbsd.org/

 

[wblock@]

FreeBSD is more minimalist than many other operating systems. X is available, but not installed by default. The majority of the 2.2G image you downloaded is binary packages, likely including X.

As @kpa suggests, PC-BSD is an easy way to get a system with all the desktop configuration already complete. If you'd like to do it yourself, the Handbook describes installation and configuration of X: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x11.html.

 

[chrbr]

Dear @nixietube,
if I am not wrong startx acts as a front end for xinit and should be provided by x11/xinit.

 

[wblock@]

Yes, but X generally depends on some other things also.