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A Day of Wasterful Efforts.

Obviously, this is very discouraging, especially for
a person with a faint heart, such as me.

I want to setup a programming enviroment in vmware. The
operating system I choose is FreeBSD. I choose it because
I can easily found the binary packages from a central
repository. Then I download a pre-installed image from
Internet, unzip it, boot it, and it works. All seems OK.
The image I found is a minimal installation, it has no X
installed. At that time, I was comfortable with it. Although
it is a minimal installation, it has essential gcc installed.
That was what I want. But going a little further, it is not
very encourging. The next thing I want is an editor. The only
editor I found is vi, and that implementation of vi does not
support lisp option. I want my emacs back. So I fetch a emacs
package, but the emacs package depends on a lot of other packages.
The result is I download the whole FreeBSD release, mount it,
installed it, and emacs works, although looks a little dump.
Some day later, I was intolerable about the default cc-mode.
I have to customize it. Previous experience tells me I need
another editor, so I switched to a modern vi, Vim. That editor
does a good editing job, especially for writing C programs. I do
not mean Emacs is inferior. On the contrary, it is too powerful
to be useful for me. If you want Emacs be friendly to you, you
have to do a lot of customizations, and I do not want to spend my
little programming time in customizing an editor.

Until yesterday, everything goes even. After day-to-day of using
it as a programming environment, I like FreeBSD very much. But I
want to use Bochs in FreeBSD, and it need to communicate with a X
server. I have to install an X implementation. After a long time,
the Xorg is in the machine, but it does not work. What should I do
now? My knowledge about X is none, I do not know how to bring it up.
Give X up.

Then I want to find a pre-installed image with X installed. In fact,
this is not a wise choice. Because this way does not work, either. I
even tried Cygwin. They say they are supporting X, but when I configure
Bochs to compile, a message box pop up, and says memory access violation.
Give Cygwin up.

All I need is an environment that can pop up multiple windows. It is
not me that need multiple windows, but some applicatoins need that. But
I have no idea of how to achieve it without installing an operating
system distribution on a metal machine.

The result is: I spend a whole day in fetching various packages from
the Internet, and no time in doing what I really want to do. At
last, the virtual machine has been deleted from local disk. But I
still want a Linux/Unix enviroment. Redo the whole process?