Recently I've been playing a little with demonstrating how to set up a
NetBSD/i386 1.5 machine as a desktop machine for a single user or a small
number of users. Nothing special, just plain NetBSD + pkgsrc + X. With
systems such as FreeBSD, the installer takes the user a bit further
through this kind of setup (including setting up X and installing a window
manager). Ours does not.

So I'm writing here what I tend to do next, really to compare notes...
I'm hoping some people might find this useful or that somebody will say
"why are you doing that when you could do this?"

Anyway, here goes...

After running the installer, I usually find myself doing the following:

Create /etc/usermgmt.conf so that new users have their home directories in
/usr/home (/home makes no sense if there is no separate /home partition,
or a symlink is created)

useradd -m gavan
passwd gavan

Edit /etc/group and add my user to wheel and operator

Log in as me and su
(ok, not strictly necessary here, but hell, why not :)

Add dhclient to /etc/rc.conf and run dhclient

ftp and unpack syssrc.tgz
Compile a new kernel and reboot
(first things first - things go a bit faster from this point on)

Install cvs. Up until now that's involved installing pkgsrc just to obtain
cvs and then deleting it again, but I imagine that would be better done
with a binary package.

export CVS_RSH=ssh
export CVSROOT=anoncvs@anoncvs.netbsd.org:/cvsroot
cd /usr
cvs checkout -P pkgsrc

Install bash and other packages
Install XF86Setup

Use XF86Setup to set up X

Find that X won't start, and use xf86config to redo it all

Find that X still won't start, so edit the XF86Config file by hand so that
X stops throwing out all of the modes and complaining that there are none
left

Install kde from pkgsrc

Come back the next day *grin*

Put kdm and kdmdesktop into /etc/rc.local or equivalent in /etc/rc.d

Log in with X

Find an old pkg that I hacked about with a while ago that manages to
intsall licq 0.61 and wish that it was in pkgsrc

Install Linux compatibility stuff and Netscape

Take a text editor to the KDE configuration files to sort out the icon
positioning [the default isn't to my taste, and the dialog box to change
it is broken under NetBSD]

Install random other applications as and when needed.

I think that's about it...

-- 
Gillette - the best a man can forget