Mike - Building ports

Alan and Kris,

Thanks for your podcasts.

I have recently retired and have been looking for things to help me stay busy.  I have been flipping bits since 1969 having started as an assembler programmer at an IBM DOS/360 shop. This was back in the day when shops would hire non-degreed guys who did well on the IBM Programmer's Aptitude test.

My introduction to UNIX came with TI's 1500 series of hardware in about 1988. By that time I had already learned C programming on various PC/MS-DOS systems - not all of them were IBM PC BIOS compatible and had done a lot of 8086 assembler including interrupt service routines.

Recently I loaded FreeBSD on a spare system and used ZFS as the device has 3 disk drives. This seemed preferable to doing the old way of manually creating mount points.

I had trouble building XFCE from the ports so I gave up and used the package. I like XFCE as it is also in use on my Ubuntu system.

Now to get to the point - how do I get into development on FreeBSD? I have never done graphical development on either UNIX or Linux. Much of the development I had done in the 'old' days was for TTY devices using curses. I still use 'vi' for my text editor.

If I get comfortable enough developing with FreeBSD, I would be amenable to take on working on ports.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.