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Not so happy with FreeBSD and PC-BSD

By Steven Rosenberg on April 8, 2008 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

The same thing has happened to me more than once. I install a FreeBSD-derived operating system on the $0 Laptop (the Gateway Solo 1450) and I marvel at the way it manages the noisy CPU fan right out of the box.

Then, the next day, it's all over. The fan blows. And blows. Even a complete reinstall won't get back my fan-managed bliss.

Another thing that impressed me about PC-BSD 1.4 was the fact that the bouncing icon on my KDE cursor was rendered properly. Before 1.4, it was an annoying graphical blog that didn't look anything like it was supposed to.

But when I rolled PC-BSD 1.4 onto the box, the X configuration utility fixed that problem for me. For a day I had a FreeBSD-based system with a fan that didn't blow all the time and a perfect X configuration.

The next day, I started PC-BSD 1.4 on the laptop. The fan blew, as I said, with no relief. I then downloaded the PC-BSD 1.5 upgrade, and even my lovely, perfectly rendered cursor icon reverted to a graphical blob -- the same blog I see in DesktopBSD and in older versions of PC-BSD.

No fan management (and it doesn't look easy to fix it, either), a crappy looking cursor ... I'm not happy. Another upgrade that made things worse, not better.

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