The FreeBSD 6 BETA 2 iso worked a treat and so now FreeBSD 6 is installed on the new machine. After installing cvsup I updated the source tree and rebuilt, then updated the ports and rebuilt those as well. Now I’m just installing gnome from ports. even on this machine (which seems a lot faster than my other machines) it’s taking a while.
The ports system works well, but sometimes is annoying. I don’t use any part of Mozilla and will install Firefox and Thunderbird (with enigmail), but still the gnome port insists on building Mozilla. I can uninstall it but as soon as I update the gnome port it’ll be rebuilt! I guess that’s the choice of the maintainer 🙁
I also need to look at getting the latest nVidia drivers for the graphics card, but will wait until this install is complete before trying to do much on that.