I can see you are back to your usual helpful self. Great info.
To be clear I never said I rejected prepackaged binaries or anything else. I simply don't want to *have* to depend on someone else porting something I want. I want to be able to do that myself, and my question was how much effort/knowledge, etc was required and if it was reasonable. Then we ran off on a tangent...
Even so, I still want a high-performing BSD to run as a secondary workstation. I may even try to develop some porting skills, but I have a full plate and can't give it the time I would like. I have pretty much given up on running any virtualization on BSD after trynig the big 3 and seeing the state of things and I'm pretty disappointed.
In case anyone's interested, openSUSE has a VirtualBox package that is really amazing. First I tried the Xen and I was amazed at the poor performance. I have to say, though, the packaging of Xen on openSUSE is superb, nothing is left out from installing the Xen-enabled kernel, to automagically updating Grub, and reminding you to reboot.
VirtualBox isn't packaged very smooth on openSUSE. It can only be run as root and you don't get the automagic popups to enter a root password when you try to execute it in Gnome, it silently dies.
However, when you run it as it needs to be run, the GUI is fine and the performance is absolutely spectacular. Even Pig/OS runs like stink in VirtualBox.
The scary thing about openSUSE is how much they hide the guts. I guess that makes it an outstanding bloze-replacement option and commercial choice. I hate to think what will happen if (when) all the magical smoke and mirrors break and something goes wrong.
In the meantime I'm also going to install some BSD again on that box. I like them all for different reasons. I wish NetBSD were more stable. It's fast. OpenBSD is great as usual and now has pretty recent packages, you can make a really nice desktop. Even VLC looks great on my widescreen. I also like FreeBSD but I'm not sure why. I guess having Vermaden around makes it easy to like
Peace,
Rand