Ah so, you are thinking vanilla FreeBSD, not MacOS X or an Apple. Don't know how fancy a motherboard or additional cards you have, but I have had little trouble getting video or sound going (the latter with as simple as a 'device pcm' in the kernel config -- which probably may even be built-in by 6.x). They did switch to X.org server as the default X server (over XFree86) way back in 5.x, which I feel may make the X configuration process (the one annoying thing in the installation) a bit less familiar.
> I also read up on Xcode and Darwinports. It's interesting that just
> reading through the Mac documentation, I was struck by its
> self-congradulary tone, its lack of concrete info, and the sort of
> more precious than thou vibe. Suck my dick. I actually got hostile
> reading it and trying to find what I wanted to know. I was getting the
> idea that I would come to a point where I had to buy another over
> price piece of Mac shit, just to get it going. Oh, you need the
> special eXtreme Panther Pussy Pac to do that---its only two hundred and
> fifty bucks...
;-) Hey, you need all sorts of defence mechanisms if your programming language of choice is Objective-C! Yeah, the Mac world is a strange one. I must say though that if GUI IDEs are your thing (in general they are not mine, and I am guessing not yours either given your mention of emacs), XCode is pretty decent (especially in comparison to Microsoft's equivalents -- *Studio, etc).
--ravi