Bsd

[x0563511]

I have delved further into the rabbit hole....

I am now the proud operator of a FreeBSD installation! Woot! I got 802.11 internet, sound, video, KDE, etc.

I am insane.

[WinstonSmith6079]

Kewl! :D

...

I don't know what a FreeBSD thing is, but gimmie hehehehe

No, seriously! How do I get it? ??? hehehehehe

[SavageMessiah]

I ran FreeBSD for a while as my full time OS. It has the biggest package repos of any *nix I've used. More packages than Debian even. I've switched back to Arch Linux tho - just a nice damn system.

At one point one of my boxen was booting FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris 10, Arch Linux, and Debian. It was a pain partitioning that mess and getting all the bootloaders to play nicely but it was definitely one of my more impressive geeky achievements.

[Wa59]

FreeBSD is a linux distribution?
i like the "UBUNTU" one =P, one day i ordered 100cds from the site, and they got here =D

[Big_al]

You can always try it out using VMware Player (free) and download a pre-create virtual machine with it installed. I've been playing with a lot of linux installs using it, my current toy of choice is Debian :)

More info there, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMWare

[Wa59]

Debian is the "apt-get" one right ?

[Nomad]

FreeBSD is a linux distribution?
i like the "UBUNTU" one =P, one day i ordered 100cds from the site, and they got here =D

Not Linux, no, but close. Unix; the same platform most OSs were built on, except for Windows. Because Bill Gates transcends mortal platforms.

[SavageMessiah]

Debian is the "apt-get" one right ?
Yeah, that's the one.

FreeBSD is a free version of BSD Unix, developed at Berkeley, oh... some long time ago. Hence the name Free...BSD.

It's nice to see someone trying one of the alternative alternative OSes :)

EDIT: Al's post reminded me of The FreeOS Zoo (http://free.oszoo.org/download.html) there's Qemu images of lots of free operating systems there. I recommend trying plan 9, it was meant to be "the next unix" but it never caught on. Some interesting ideas in it.

Savage sez: The worst enemy of the next great os is the one that's just good enough.

[rustyslacker]

Just a little bit of info: BSD stands for Berkley System Distribution.

I've been wanting to try FreeBSD for a while. How is it compared to Linux?

[Aliotroph?]

Never used FreeBSD. We had a lot of OpenBSD boxen at school until last year though. The labs were setup with something like a three-way split between OpenBSD, Solaris 9, and a custom Linux build. What a disgusting mess! Most of the apps were stored in common public directories and it was just ugly trying to get them to play nice accross three OSes.

Other than some weird stuff going on with xterm windows it felt just like Linux though. They eventually moved everything onto shiny new boxen running Linux. Sadly, even then they didn't get things like X forwarding to work without breaking a lot of apps.

In summary, I miss the Slackware box that used to live in my bro's room before it blew up. The Ubunto box in there now just doesn't have the same geek factor. :p

[x0563511]

its nice. A lot of things don't happen untill you set it up though

Getting my wireless working (atheros based Netgeat 108mbps cardbus (WG511T)) was as easy as adding it into the kernel config.

Getting font antialiasing was trickier, as I had to write an XML file with a few case matching rules to get it working.


Sound, video (what little this laptop has), wireless, etc all works.

Speedy and responsive too. Seems better put together. Ports system is what gentoo's ebuild/emerge system was based from it seems (go to /usr/ports/games/doomlegacy and run "make && make install clean" and it downloads, patches, compiles, installs, and then cleans up temporary files from compiling.

theres also a binary package system but you need to basically know the whole name of the .tgz you need.

More information:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/

Works well in VMWare, so give it a shot. It's only 2 CDs. (most of the stuff is online, but a fully functional system (including your choice of Gnome, KDE, or XFCE) is possible from the two CDs.

Screenshot of my system: (dont worry about bandwidth, i get 50mbps/day)
http://keleus.freeshell.org/screenshot.png

[rustyslacker]

I'll try it out in VMWare or Qemu someday. *l7* Dial-up is not friendly to downloading new OSs.

[SavageMessiah]

run "make && make install clean" and it downloads, patches, compiles, installs,

I don't have the patience to compile everything. Most stuff is pretty quick but firefox takes FOREVER.

[Aliotroph?]

Hehehe, doesn't FF use its own GUI toolkit? GUI toolkits always take bloody forever to compile. Yuck.

[rustyslacker]

I was such an idiot when I installed SuSE 10 on my comp. I completely forgot GCC. :(

[Doom_Dude]

When I see BSD I think: Blue Screen of Death. heh

[x0563511]

I don't have the patience to compile everything. Most stuff is pretty quick but firefox takes FOREVER.

"man pkg_add" :D

[Aliotroph?]

I was such an idiot when I installed SuSE 10 on my comp. I completely forgot GCC. :(

Hehehe. FC4 wouldn't let me install it without gcc. That became a big problem because I was trying to downgrade the version so I could use f77 instead of gfortran. Finally gave up and used FC3 on that comp. :/

[SavageMessiah]

"man pkg_add" :D

I ended up doing it that way, but I remember getting irritated with interactions between ports and packages and installing, uninstalling, dependencies blah it was a wierd mess but probably my fault.