Results tagged “PC-BSD” from CLICK

So I figure I'll try OpenSUSE 10.3 today. Before that I tried out the Fedora 8 live CD. Not super impressive, although I'm not saying I won't take a look at Fedora 9 when it comes out.

Anyhow, I install OpenSUSE on one of my free partitions. For some reason, I can't get the network configured. My static IP information just won't stick.

This after a weekend during which every time I booted into PC-BSD 1.5 it looked worse. First my ACPI fan management went away, then my KDE "bouncing icon" cursor thingy returned to its pre-1.5 blurriness when a new app is launched..

So I had SUSE on the box. Even though the live CD booted in 1024x768, after the install (during which you'd think the system would ASK me whether or not I wanted a static IP ... but I digress) I had only 800x600 resolution. It was easy enough to choose 1024x768, 24-bit, reboot and get the right resolution, but do they have to make networking so hard?

I should probably give Fedora 8 a run at the hard drive ... or maybe I should just wait for Ubuntu 8.04, which is only a few days away at this point.

Before I did anything, since things were already screwed up, I did a NetBSD 4.0 install to the SUSE partition. It wasn't the prettiest looking thing -- the installer, that is -- and I tried NOT to install a new Master Boot Record. But I did end up with one, and I booted straight into NetBSD. It looks exactly like FreeBSD when you start X. Twm is the window manager. And no, I still couldn't exit X from the Twm menu. I had to use ctrl-alt-backspace. So either Twm, or NetBSD and FreeBSD, do not like the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450).

I was left without the GRUB bootloader. In order to restore GRUB, I started with the Lenny business-card CD in the "rescue" mode. All I wantws to do is reinstall GRUB, and I'm being asked all kinds of questions about my drives, how I want them formatted, waiting for the base system to install ... I got out of there quick. I didn't want to screw up my current Lenny install, which I'm actually relying on heavily at the moment.

Here's how the laptop is set up. The drive is 30 GB. I have Linux swap on hda1. My "experimental" partition, which went from PC-BSD to SUSE to NetBSD in about an hour, is 10 GB on hda2. Debian Lenny is on hda3, also 10 GB. I have an extended partition (hda5) which is formatted to ext3, on which I back up files from the other installs.

To fix GRUB, I booted into Knoppix 5.1.1, opened up a terminal, did su to root and then the following (thanks to Kyle Rankin's excellent "Knoppix Hacks"; and yes, we all need a copy of this very valuable book):

My Lenny filesystem (which had a "good" /boot/grub/menu.lst) was automatically mounted by Knoppix, so I remounted it with the dev option and write permission:

# mount -o remount,dev,rw /mnt/hda3

Then I restored GRUB:

# chroot /mnt/hda3

# grub-install /dev/hda

Again, thanks to Kyle Rankin's "Knoppix Hacks" for the tip.

I'm not one to give up, although I seem to do it all the time. If I install an OS, and it doesn't work out, chances are I'll pull it off and replace it with something else. But I keep going back to what didn't quite work all the way, and so I'm back in the world of PC-BSD.

Why both desktop FreeBSD projects -- DesktopBSD and PC-BSD-- insist on pushing KDE and not offering even a spin on Xfce, or GNOME, I don't know. Whether it's habit, preference, or prejudice, I'm more comfortable in GNOME, although I like a well-appointed Fluxbox, Fvwm, or Xfce desktop, and use them fairly often. The fact that PC-BSD installs with Fluxbox means I'll have an alternative environment to play with right away.

I guess coming from a couple of years using machines less powerful than this not-so-powerful laptop (Gateway Solo 1450 with 1.3 GHz Celeron, 1 GB RAM), KDE can be very slow. I love Konqueror, K3B and Krita, but have been less in love with KOffice, and never much liked any of the K text editors (Kate, Kwrite, KEdit).

Right now, I miss the GNOME app that lets me switch easily between network settings (I have static IP at the office, dynamic IP at home).

I've been initially very happy with the way FreeBSD and PC-BSD has treated this laptop. But that happiness gives way to frustration in about 24 hours.

I start out with ACPI management of the CPU fan that eludes most Linux kernels (until I put one quick line in /etc/rc.local). And then I suffered through the bouncing KDE icons that looked like graphical mush whenever I launched an application.

This last time, I happened to install PC-BSD 1.4, and it worked well. But the next day, I rolled in the 1.5 upgrade via PBI, and it all fell apart. My cursor's bouncing launch icons turned back into unrecognizable blobs, and to top it off, ACPI fan management stopped working.

I lost ACPI fan management in just as little time with FreeBSD 7. And suffering through a day of the Twm window manager didn't help. I tried to install Fluxbox, but I couldn't figure it out, and since I couldn't even quit X without doing ctrl-alt-backspace, I quickly fled.

But today, after OpenBSD 4.3 didn't spark an immediate ACPI love affair (I'll try again when 4.3 is released, and again with the release after that -- I will NOT give up), I began looking for things to occupy my free primary partition (BSDs don't like secondary partitions). I thought about OpenSUSE, but that's too boring.

The Internet was moving quickly today in the office, so I downloaded and burned the two PC-BSD 1.5 CDs. The install went perfectly.

Since this is really a Debian Lenny machine -- that's what I use most of the time -- I opted NOT to install a bootloader with PC-BSD 1.5. I already had entries for FreeBSD 7 and OpenBSD 4.3.

One thing I did differently during this PC-BSD install was to create a separate slice for /home (I think it's /usr/home, as the system told me; all I know is I have it). That way I can presumably reinstall without wiping out whatever files I happen to produce with this installation.

And while the upgrade from 1.4 to 1.5 screwed up X (even though the xorg.conf files were identical), the straight 1.5 install has left me with a perfect X configuration.

I'd hoped that my daughter's favorite educational game would be available as easy-to-install PBIs, but alas, only TuxPaint has made the PBI cut.

I'm sure that the others -- gCompris and Childsplay -- are available as FreeBSD packages or ports, and I'll get around to installing them as soon as I can.

And I'll be hoping that PC-BSD 1.5 will boot tomorrow with full CPU fan management. One thing I've noticed in my past three FreeBSD-type installs is that the fan cycles much more quickly under FreeBSD than under Linux. This laptop still runs too damned hot, though.

Later that night: OK, so I boot into PC-BSD 1.5 a mere few hours after it was working fine. ACPI control of the CPU fan is a mere memory, as said fan is blasting away unabated. What is the deal? Either the OS controls the fan, or it doesn't. I'm doing a software update right now, and I'm going to resist the urge to wipe PC-BSD off of the drive tonight.

PC-BSD looks great, but there's something about FreeBSD; if my fan starts and stops normally the first time(s) I use it, why does that functionality suddenly fall away?

Konqueror doesn't conquer Movable Type: I've always loved the Konqueror browser. Still do. But it doesn't play nicely with Movable Type. None of the buttons work for styling text or creating links. Sure looks nice, though. And starts quicker than anything. If only GNOME had a browser that was so well-integrated into the desktop environment ... Epiphany is more autonomous. Probably not a bad thing, but who the hell knows?

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.

I did an install of FreeBSD 7 on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) a couple of weeks ago for a number of reasons.

First, I wanted to see how the new FreeBSD would run. It's supposed to be light years faster than the previous releases, at least in server situations, and I'm very much interested in how it performs on the desktop as well.

Besides Linux, which I'm still running plenty, I'm determined to see what the non-Linux alternatives have to offer. Due to it being the first BSD I could successfully install on my VIA C3 Samuel test box, I began with OpenBSD, a system I continue to be very impressed with. Sure, I had to do a bit of reading in order to do the install, but I followed the FAQ and was able to get a working system very quickly.