===Gregory Masseau===
I finally managed to find the time to complete reinstalling FreeBSD on a Virtual machine, after accidentally losing my old VM a couple of weeks ago. As always, installing FreeBSD is relatively simple, straightforwards, and surprisingly fast - once you've done it a few times and remember what keys to press in what order, you can pretty much finish the portion of installation requiring human interaction in under a minute. Being half asleep, I somehow managed to miss the confirmation for the ports collection the first time, so I had to reinstall, but the second time was as quick as the first. After installation, the system comes up with no problems and everything appears to be working out of the box, including networking. I decided to first try installing a package using the ports method, and settled on the 'nano' text editor. As far as use goes, the ports collection is quite easy to use -- usually, you just change directories to the one containing the port you want and run 'make install distclean'. The disadvantage, however, appears to be speed - nano has been compiling for the past 15 minutes, and I'm still waiting for it to complete! Wow... after 20 minutes, nano is finally done compiling, and appears to work as expected. Using the ports method was easy, and simple, but it certainly did take a while for the software to compile. Next, I decided to install the emacs text editor using the 'package' (sysinstall) method. Getting the install going took a few more steps than the ports method since there are a few intervening menus in the curses interface of sysinstall before one arrives at the actual list of packages, but, despite emacs' great size in comparison to nano, isntalling it proved much quicker since it did not have to be compiled from scratch. Looking at the software selections available in each, I find that while many crucial pieces of software are held in the sysinstall package list, the ports selection has an overall wider selection of software available. I think overall that both are necessary, as you cannot necessary get a given package from both methods. If a package is available by both methods, it seems that sysinstall is quicker due to avoiding the need to compile.
