FreeBSD for a high school class? (long)

[Adam Vande More]

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Brent Bloxam <brentb at beanfield.com> wrote:

> Chris wrote:
>
>  The course is HTML. Mouse button operations should be close,
>> a window that gives a simple file directory and a text editor that
>> doesn't require learning a character command set would be the
>> target.
>>
>
>
> Hi Chris,
>
> Maybe look at using Xfce, which is a lightweight window manager based on
> GTK+ and is available in the ports tree and as a package (from the machine
> specs, I assume you'll be installing packages). The theme you use for it
> will impact performance as well, but the default should be fine.
>
> For text-editing you can try Mousepad (
> http://www.xfce.org/projects/mousepad/) and Thunar (
> http://www.xfce.org/projects/thunar/) for file management
>
> I agree xfce is a good choice.  Another thing you may wish to consider is a
IDE to develop in.  As someone already mentioned, learning vi is invaluable,
but sometimes a gui editor is better suited to the task.  My newest favorite
is Netbeans.  It's compatible with a host of different programming and
markup languages including html.  This will give you a nice gui with syntax
highlighting and many other useful features.  Most could also be found on
vi/vim, but I suspect your students will have an easier time on Netbeans.
It wouldn't be snappy on the hardware you mentioned but should be useable.
Hopefully you have a better system to build packages on.


-- 
Adam Vande More