Recently in FreeBSD Category

This is one of the great things about FreeBSD: They make a release, and you know right then how long it will be supported by the security team.

Look at this post by Remko Lodder (linked to from Planet FreeBSD) on the March 23, 2010 release of FreeBSD 7.3-release (which I'm running right now):

The FreeBSD Security Team currently plans to support FreeBSD 7.3 until March 31st 2012. Users of FreeBSD 7.2 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to either FreeBSD 7.3 or FreeBSD 8.0 before the FreeBSD 7.2 End of Life on June 30th 2010.

A two-year support life with the option to upgrade to the FreeBSD 8.x branch at any time? That's great. More than one -release branch going at the same time? More than one -stable branch, plus a -current branch if you want it? FreeBSD has a whole lot of flexibility depending on what you want out of the system and what your comfort level is with bleeding-edge software, frequency and quantity of updates, and of course what your hardware and tasks require.

I chose 7.3-release for a couple of reasons: I wanted to run a -release branch, and at present 8.0-release doesn't have as many precompiled binary packages as 7.3-release, and since 7.3-release is newer, all of its packages are newer as well.

The next 8.x release will probably take care of that, and I'll be more comfortable upgrading to it, but for now 7.3-release is working great for me.

Following Remko's suggestion to look at the FreeBSD Security page, you can see that every other release in a given numerical series is an "extended" release, meaning it gets two years of support.

So 7.2-release, being a "Normal" release, has an "estimated EOL (end of life)" of about a year and a month.

FreeBSD 8.0-release is also a "Normal" release, supported until Nov. 30, 2010. And when 8.1-release is finally released (no date set), it will be an "extended" release and be supported for two years after its release date.

So right now you can run FreeBSD 6.x, 7.x and 8.x -release branches with support from the FreeBSD security team.

I've been running free, open-source operating systems on my main laptop for about two years now, and especially in the past six months I don't just load on an OS, play around and then write a quickie review (although I have been known to do that on occasion).

No, I'm actually using these systems. I put in a full 6 months with OpenBSD 4.4, maybe 6 months with Ubuntus 8.04-9.10) then 3 to 4 months with Debian Lenny.

Now I'm running FreeBSD 7.3-release, and while like OpenBSD (but somewhat less so) it takes more work to set up than your average Linux distribution, I'm finding the system to be extremely stable. Even calling Flash "problematic" is something I do with qualifications: Video is a bit choppy, audio is perfect, and while the npviewer.bin processes can eat quite a bit of CPU, once you close the page that spawned them, they go away, which is very nice.

Java performance has been great, and the desktop (for me GNOME and Fvwm2) is extremely fast.

I've used packages and ports, and everything has built/run just fine.

I must have forgotten the -P switch to portupgrade when updating my FreeBSD 7.3-release packages and ports. That switch would have tried to use packages instead of ports when possible to do the upgrade. I'm really not sure if I typed -P as part of the command or not.

All I know is that ports are building, and I can't hang around to answer the inevitable pre-build questions before many of them, meaning I'll return to the computer in the morning as it's waiting for user input and continue the process that started in the afternoon and threatens to continue well into tomorrow.

There's something to be said for operating systems that rely solely on binary updates. I knew there was a reason for PC-BSD ...

The FreeBSD Handbook appeared cryptic on how exactly to update packages and ports. I'm sure the answer is in there, but I just couldn't find it.

However, I do have Dru Lavigne's new book, "The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD," and I'm following her instructions on pages 247-251 on how to use csup and portupgrade to update both packages and ports on my FreeBSD 7.3-release installation.

Yep, her PC-BSD book is helping me with FreeBSD — which isn't so unusual since PC-BSD 8.0 is based on FreeBSD 8.0.

Yesterday I fixed my problem with pkg_add, which was pulling packages from 7-stable instead of 7.3-release. I'll write that up soon.

My short review of Dru's PC-BSD book is that it's a must for the novice PC-BSD user and has more than enough tips for the advanced BSD user who wants to run PC-BSD or even FreeBSD. It's a great companion for her "Best of FreeBSD Basics" book, which I also highly recommend.

I'm still in the middle of my csup, so I'll report on how it turns out. And while I'm sure I have a GhostBSD (FreeBSD live with GNOME) disc somewhere, I'm about to burn a new one and see how its GNOME environment compares to my own. Hopefully I'll glean a few tips that will help me in my GNOMEish FreeBSD 7.3-release install.

I've been running FreeBSD for more than a week now - first 8.0-release, now 7.3-release (with packages for some reason coming from 7-stable), and as the title of this post says, it's going very well.

I started with the idea that I'd run the full GNOME desktop with all the apps I used in Debian, and I pretty much have that setup.

But late last week I set up the Fvwm2 window manager - and just like in any other Unix-like OS, running something like Fvwm2 (or Fluxbox, which I also have in this install) does consume fewer resources than GNOME. Not that GNOME is by any means slow in FreeBSD on this hardware (Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 with 1.2 GHz Celeron, 1 GB RAM).

But I could see in the top utility that Fvwm was easier on both CPU and RAM.

Not that I'm doing everything in Fvwm2. I'm working right now and am doing so in GNOME.

As I alluded to above, I'm not sure whether or not it has been the case since I did the install of 7.3-release, but it looks like when I use pkg_add to install binary packages that my system is pulling from the 7-stable repository and not the 7.3-release repo.

I noticed because I've had to "force" a couple of packages to install due to slight differences in the versions of dependencies that are already part of the system. I'm unsure whether to a) change PACKAGESITE to point to 7.3-release, b) upgrade the system itself from 7.3-release to 7-stable, c) upgrade to 8.0-release or 8-stable, or d) don't do anything.

At the moment everything is working, so I'm leanign toward answer "d" - doing nothing.

I even solved my X problems, some of which were caused by my starting X with the command startx in a root shell rather than my user shell.

Once I figured that out and then invoked DPMS in my xorg.conf:

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier	"Configured Monitor"
	Option		"DPMS"

Then I had my screensaver issues solved. The computer goes into regular screensaver mode, then eventually the system turns the screen off entirely, and I can get back from either screensaver mode by moving the mouse.

I even installed a few ports, as opposed to precompiled binary packages, which I generally prefer due to the speed with which they are installed, my own laziness, and my worry about running out of disk space (I'm working with 20 GB total here ....).

I built gThumb from ports because I needed IPTC capability baked in. The ports system in FreeBSD lets you choose this option from a handy menu when you are building the application. I've since found out that gThumb in Debian is built with IPTC support - which is how I discovered that it's exactly what I need for Web photo editing - but gThumb in Ubuntu leaves IPTC out, rendering it mostly useless for my work.

It's great that in FreeBSD building the package from source the way I want/need it is so easy to do.

In order to get CUPS printing working, I had to reinstall a couple of packages for which I used ports.

So I have a nice setup here with GNOME 2.28, Fvwm2, Fluxbox if I decide to use it, all the apps I generally use, and I have all of my user files on this system now. I kept my 3+GB of Thunderbird mail on a USB stick that I can access from this machine, and I've been using Gmail as my main mail client, through which I'm filtering a whole bunch of mail.

I never thought POP-ing down mail with Thunderbird was the best solution, and having to back up that Thunderbird mail, which always takes an eon or two, made me want to continue in that mode even less.

I know Google is targeting ads to me based on what's in my e-mail and documents, but the service is just too good for me to pass it up at this juncture.

I should probably mention again that I do have Java working in my Web browsers, I have Flash 9 installed, even though it's problematic resources-wise (and I have it turned off in Firefox for that reason, leaving Epiphany as my "Flash browser").

Overall, many more things work than don't in this FreeBSD 7.3-release installation, so I think I'll be sticking with it for a while.

Getting wireless working was easy. I had this guide on my hard drive (and readable in a Web browser at file:///usr/share/doc/handbook/network-wireless.html), and my Cnet CWD-854 USB WiFi adapter (as rum0) was easy to configure.

Just like in OpenBSD, networking in FreeBSD is extremely solid.

I've set up CUPS printing before in just about every Unix-ish operating system I've run for any length of time (Debian, Ubuntu, OpenBSD).

Maybe not so curiously, I've always found that dealing with CUPS directly through the Web browser at http://localhost:631 is easier than with any GUIs that ship with a given distro or project.

Not that FreeBSD or OpenBSD have such a thing. You have to do a lot yourself, and through that process you learn quite a bit about how CUPS and networked printers work.

OpenBSD provided excellent instructions, I recall, as does FreeBSD, where I was pleasantly surprised to find that my friend Chess Griffin is responsible for the documentation. Thanks go to him and the many others who make the FreeBSD Handbook, FAQ and the system's comprehensive man pages the great resources they continue to be.

Chess, whose now-ended Linux Reality podcast was a great inspiration to me, has been using both FreeBSD and OpenBSD extensively over the past long while, and his recent e-mails to me have encouraged me to continue running FreeBSD when I might have otherwise given up due to my constant impatience when things don't immediately work as I think they should.

Back to CUPS: It's always dicey. I used old notes I took the last time I set up CUPS (in Debian Lenny) to get the path to my network printer just right.

The BSDs don't tend to install a lot of drivers, which is a good thing because it's easy enough to go to the drivers area of CUPS.org and grab only what you need.

As in OpenBSD, there are maybe a half-dozen things that you need to do configuration-wise to get CUPS running in FreeBSD (and they're all in the Handbook).

I've had a little time to think about it, and I realized that it's not yet time to give up on FreeBSD 7.3. I'm not in any way saying I'll be sticking with it long-term. But I think I should spend some more time running it before I end the test.

Right now I'm rsyncing over a bunch of user files that I hadn't yet moved from my backup drive. Then I can disconnect that drive, protecting it from any filesystem-harming crashes, and proceed to work on the FAT drive automounting problem.

The main reason I decided to stay with FreeBSD 7.3 longer is the incredible performance on the desktop. I don't have any benchmarks to back this up — I'm not a benchmarkish kind of person, I'm just a regular user. And FreeBSD 8.0, in the time I ran it, seemed even faster than 7.3, but since the precompiled binary packages for 7.3-release are a whole lot more up to date than those with 8.0-release, I decided to reinstall with the earlier version to get GNOME 2.28 (instead of 2.26) as well as many packages that for one reason or another (most of which utterly escape me) are not available in 8.0-release, including OpenOffice and vlc, the latter of which has saved me from the always crashing Totem, which doesn't like my X setup, or so I surmise.

Again, I'm no expert, but my time in OpenBSD (4.2 to 4.5) and FreeBSD (8.0 and 7.3), both with versions of the UFS filesystem, crashes or power interruptions hit a bit harder - the fsck procedure takes quite a long time. In Linux with a journaling filesystem such as ext3, recovery is much quicker.

Note: Whether or not it matters, I'm using soft updates in FreeBSD, which are invoked by default. I can't remember whether or not I turned on soft updates in OpenBSD.

I've heard on BSD Talk, which I recommend highly, that some kind of journaling is coming to the FFS/UFS in FreeBSD. I don't know what the real-geek opinion of journaling in BSD is, but it seems to me like a good idea.

So I'll have a whole lot of user files (with my 3 GB+ of Thunderbird mail on an 8 GB ext3-formatted USB stick) on this FreeBSD installation, and I could very well see myself in this environment at least until Debian Squeeze's release as a Stable distribution is imminent.

As I wrote previously, I did manage to get both Java and Flash working in my Web browsers, although Flash is more than a bit problematic performance-wise — I've already turned it off in Firefox and am more than happy to run it solely in GNOME's Epiphany browser for the time being (and couldn't run it all in Firefox 3.6.1 ... but a replacement of 3.6.1 with Firefox 3.5.8 made it all come together).

I've always said that the GNOME desktop is faster than you'd think it would be, and that speed only seems to be maximized in FreeBSD on this hardware (1.2 GHz Celeron CPU, 1 GB RAM on this 2002-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop).

Not only have I been able to crash FreeBSD 7.3-release with GNOME by trying to automount FAT partitions on USB-connected drives, but those crashes rendered both the FAT partitions and the ext3 partitions that otherwise could be mounted automatically on those drives, for lack of a better word, unmountable.

I was able to mount the ext3 partitions once again in FreeBSD after a lengthy fsck courtesy of gParted on the Parted Magic live CD.

Then I did it all over again. I'm running fsck on the drives now. They could always be mounted in Parted Magic 4.9, by the way, just not in FreeBSD.

Once the fsck finishes, I'll boot into FreeBSD, make sure the ext3 partitions are mountable, make a backup of my FreeBSD user and relevant configuration files, and then I'll be moving on.

If this was a true test machine, I'd be able to run FreeBSD longer and perhaps figure out some of these issues (many of which are HAL-related, and if not HAL-specific, at least GNOME-specific).

When I ran OpenBSD 4.4 as my desktop OS, I didn't run into these problems. But I also didn't run GNOME, so it's not apples-to-apples between these two BSDs. In OpenBSD, I began with the default Fvwm2 window manager and eventually added Xfce. And I didn't automount anything.

I imaging that getting FreeBSD to work like any Linux distribution that ships with GNOME is doable, but I just don't have the time and expertise to do it.

I got a lot further a lot faster in FreeBSD than I did with OpenBSD in terms of getting my system set up. But if attempting to mount FAT filesystems is enough to crash the system and lead to endless fsck operations, I really can't stay with FreeBSD for my personal production workflow.

I did manage to get Java installed. The binary package didn't work because the dependencies in FreeBSD 7.3-release are too new. For one reason or other, I was unable to get the diablo-jre port to build, but the diablo-jdk port did successfully install the Java development kit — including the runtime, which is all I really needed.

I even got Flash to work in both Firefox and GNOME's Epiphany browser. I followed the instructions in the FreeBSD Handbook, and when they didn't work in Firefox 3.6.1, I replaced that Firefox package with version 3.5.8 and soon had Flash working.

The problem is that the Flash processes — which run as npviewer.bin, I believe — hog up a whole lot of CPU and aren't terribly good about reducing that load when I leave a page that includes Flash.

I could do without Flash — or maybe install a Linux browser (an option that's certainly available) and just have Flash there, like I did with Opera in OpenBSD.

I was able to mount FAT drives with the -o large switch in mount_msdosfs, but I wasn't able to umount them. I suppose HAL could have played a role, and perhaps running GNOME without hald enabled is the way to go.

But as I said, I need to get this laptop back into a regular production role, and I'll probably return to Debian Lenny just to get things back to where they were. If you'll recall, my Lenny-to-Squeeze dist-upgrade debacle is what led me here in the first place.

One thing I will be doing in the very near future is figuring out how to image a hard drive with either Ghost 4 Linux in Parted Magic, or using the Clonezilla live CD. If I can image the entire drive and be assured that I could completely restore an installation after any upgrade, I'll feel a whole lot better about doing things like this.

What I really need are a couple/few more test machines on which to run things such as FreeBSD until I can figure out just how far my skill level can take me with them.

We could argue the whole Linux distro-vs.-BSD project thing all day, but I'll say two things:

• There's something to be said for a distribution (or project) that ships with a certain desktop environment as far as more things working than not out of the box.
• The PC-BSD project - a desktop-ready system built on FreeBSD - is the best way for anybody from the Linux world wishing to get the most out of FreeBSD. The importance of PC-BSD at this point cannot be overstated (it helps if you like KDE and PC-BSD's PBI packaging). I'd love to see a FreeBSD desktop project based on GNOME.

In conclusion: My skill level and the time I have available to mess around with stuff just isn't where it needs to be for me to run FreeBSD with GNOME. If I had a bigger hard drive, I'd dual-boot Linux and one or more BSDs (now I'm working with 20 GB, which isn't enough for a credible dual-boot). But for a single-boot system, I need to be back in an environment that is a bit more ready out of the box. And this week, that's Linux.

Saw this on Distrowatch Weekly: The Debian Live project has released live DVD images for Squeeze Alpha 1.

The images are all 1 GB + (except for the Rescue and Standard versions), so that's a bit of a change from the Lenny era. You'll need to use a DVD. Due to my Toshiba's hatred of CD-R but surprising love of DVD+R, I've been burning everything, including CD images, onto DVD, and it's worked quite well.

There are ISOs for GNOME, KDE, LXDE and Xfce, as well as the aforementioned Rescue and Standard (no GUI for both) spins.

One thing that's very notable: There are PowerPC images this time. I remember there most decidedly NOT being PowerPC live Debian CDs for Lenny, and a check of the download area for live Lenny confirms this.

I've written many times about how well Debian Etch runs on my Mac G4/466, and to see more of a commitment to PowerPC rather than less (or none) is a very good thing indeed. I never had much luck with Ubuntu on PowerPC back when it was an official port (the 6.06-7.04 era, if I recall correctly; there are community ports to PowerPC still active, but I've never tried them - Debian is just too good on this hardware to think about using anything else).

Getting back to the live Squeeze images, I downloaded one yesterday and have yet to burn a DVD and give it a spin. For me, live images are practically a must. I need to explore as much hardware compatibility as I can before I commit to a new distribution/project for my operating system. Until now, I've been relying on the excellent Sidux 2009-04 as my main Debian live test environment. But I'm always glad to have alternatives, especially ones that are pure Debian.

I can also report that the current builds of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid are running well on my Toshiba and Gateway laptops (both Intel 830m chipsets) if you turn off kernel mode setting with nomodeset in the bootline.

And now that I know you can pause the invisible Grub2 menu in an installed Ubuntu Lucid desktop by holding down the Shift key during the beginning of the boot, I know that I can boot into the new installation and fix Grub2 permanently to keep nomodeset in the boot line.

I remain addicted to speed - desktop speed, if you need clarification on what I mean. And Debian is all about that, a bit moreso than Ubuntu. And it's something you can definitely feel on older hardware.

I'm pretty sure Ubuntu can be made as fast as Debian, but some tweaking is involved. Not to say Ubuntu is a dog or anything, because it most assuredly is not, but Debian and Slackware especially tend to maximize the power you have in your hardware.

Coincidentally, the system I'm running right now - FreeBSD 7.3-release - is extremely quick as well. More on that later.

Can you install Debian with the live image? I'm not sure you can. There is some talk about modifying the running live system to invoke the installer, but it looks like you're better off grabbing a Squeeze image and creating a real Debian install disc, whether it be the first full CD, a DVD or even Blu-ray image, or a much-smaller network-install or business-card install image (the latter two which I favor, since the newest packages are pulled from the repository and you don't need to do a massive update right out of the box).

As I've reported in too much detail, my Lenny-to-Squeeze upgrade didn't go too well. I'm hoping migration issues are fixed by the time Squeeze goes Stable, but at the moment I'm recommending such an in-place upgrade unless you've done a lot of homework as to exactly how to do it. Clearly I haven't done said homework, and that's why I'm not running Debian at this moment.