I'd love to be a BSD fan
BSD is so mature, so orderly, so ... run by adults. Or so says the PR (what little there is).
But whenever I try to actually run BSD, I run into trouble. I haven't tried any BSDs since my review of FreeSBIE back in April, so recently I figured I'd give some BSD distros a spin.
Since I was no fan of the FreeSBIE live CD, I figured I would try a hard drive install. I wanted to put FreeBSD on my test box -- the Maxspeed Maxterm thin client (VIA C3 1 GHz processor, 256 MB Ram, ECS EVEm motherboard, with external CD drive and interchangeable hard drives).
I was ready to sacrifice my Debian drive to the cause. But FreeBSD quit somewhere in the bootloader.
I already knew that the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 233 MHz Pentium II MMX and a scant 64 MB RAM) might not be the best candidate, but out of obligation I tried to run two live CDs: FreeSBIE and TrueBSD. Neither would load. I didn't expect anything with only 64 MB of RAM, and my expectations were met.
So I figured I'd try FreeSBIE on my Dell box (3 GHz Pentium 4, 512 MB RAM). It booted to a shell, but when I tried to start the GUI with startx, the whole thing went to shit. Now I've learned a lot in the past few months, and I'm sure I could hack the X config to get Xfce running, but I just didn't have it in me. TrueBSD (I know it's release 0.1, but it's the only one available) wouldn't load at all.
On my Maxspeed test box, FreeSBIE would load, but I couldn't get anything better than 640x480 resolution, and even as root I couldn't edit xorg.conf to change it. Oh ... and it couldn't find my Ethernet adapter. TrueBSD wouldn't boot at all.
I'd still love to run one of the BSDs, and I'm not giving up, but all the hype about how the "maturity" of BSD's code and philosophy doesn't hold much water when it won't install it on equipment that doesn't blink at Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Fluxbuntu, Debian, Puppy, Damn Small Linux, Mepis, Knoppix, Slax and ZenWalk.
I've gotten many comments over the months about how I should try PC-BSD, but I want the full "ports" experience of FreeBSD (and I'm open to NetBSD and OpenBSD, too). DesktopBSD would probably be easier, but I don't want to be locked into KDE.
I want to love BSD (I already love the free, comprehensive documentation for FreeBSD), but it's got to show me a little installation love first.
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Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Don't try a distro if you want an operating system - OpenBSD and FreeBSD work significantly better than their offshoot distributions.
Really, FreeBSD in it's true form will work better for you than FreeSBIE.
OpenBSD should run on the old lappy of yours.
I will burn OpenBSD next week and give it a try.
"I'm open to NetBSD and OpenBSD, too"
If you're gonna try OpenBSD, you might want to check out this install HOWTO: http://www.openbsd101.com
The installer for OpenBSD can be a little bit daunting. I personally never bother installing it on a system where I can't give it the entire drive, because I just can't figure out their MBR partitioner, which is not to be confused with the BSD partitioner.
"I've gotten many comments over the months about how I should try PC-BSD, but I want the full "ports" experience of FreeBSD"
PC-BSD actually does give you that. You don't have to use their PBI package management system, you can just pop open a terminal and use ports or packages to install stuff.
"DesktopBSD would probably be easier, but I don't want to be locked into KDE."
Unlike PC-BSD, DesktopBSD actually uses FreeBSD's ports collection for it's primary package management, in either case you're not locked to KDE, that's just what they give you by default. For example, there's nothing preventing you from installing KDE on Ubuntu, which gives you GNOME by default.
AFAIK, KDE has been much more open to the issue of portability, and have paid more attention to it than GNOME. This is only something that I've heard, so I can't confirm it.
Why not install the "true" FreeBSD on the $15 laptop. I think it wuold work quite well on it.
I too gave *BSD a try lately, after many happy years with Debian, just for the sake of a (potentially) more stable kernel, the (perverted) desire to try out ports for a while instead of apt, and (undoubtedly) better man pages :)
Unfortunately, FreeBSD 6 couldn't even use my harddrive! Linux has no problem at all with it, but FreeBSD complains about IDE errors. I know that Linux can complain about similar errors (and continue), but in this case, Linux thought everything was fine (and ran perfectly stably), and FreeBSD couldn't even use boot.
The only one I got to boot was DragonFly, which seems like an interesting project (including some of HURD's principles). However, it's based on a FreeBSD 4 branch, and doesn't get as much development, which is probably just why it doesn't have that error.
All this said, if you like Debian, and fancy FreeBSD kernels, then Debian GNU/kfreebsd is the most obvious choice.
> All this said, if you like Debian, and fancy FreeBSD kernels, then Debian GNU/kfreebsd is the most obvious choice.
May as well drive a Geo with a Hemi or a Corvette with a v4.
Give OpenBSD a shot. The hardest part is setting up your hard drive for the install, but if you're willing to dedicate the whole drive to OpenBSD then it's a lot simpler.
The big paradigm shift from linux, IMHO, is MBR Partition vs BSD Partition. However, this is no different from 'slices' and 'partitions' in FreeBSD. Once you've taken the time to learn them, they're not hard at all to comprehend.
Easily installed PC-BSD and have updated it to v1.3.4. The ports install method or PC-BSD's PBI both work well. However, for stability and usability, I was disappointed - cannot install HP C3180 all-in-one, setting up wifi was hell (but it works), Dacom PC card modem freezes the system totally, and Firefox randomly & frequently crashes the whole machine back to reboot (a unique experience for me). The forums were solicitous but ultimately unhelpful.
So, I stay with Dapper, Mepis, Zenwalk (now running), PCLOS, Slackware & Sam on one Thinkpad. All my Linux distros run well and reliably - weeeks up at a time. So, frankly, I think BSD needs a bit more work.
Try NetBSD. It will run immediately after the installation. The ISO is only 300 mb and the whole instalation is approximately 10 mins on 2 ghz. processor. But you could run NetBSD on very old hardware.... Pentium 75 MHz and 16 MB Ram....
Try it!