the FreeBSD thread

[hellknight]

Hey FOSS guys. FreeBSD has been often neglected in the forum. Although all the Mactards keep on blabbering about their Mac OS X, they forget one thing that Mac OS X is nothing without FreeBSD. So, I urge you all to give a try to FreeBSD or PC-BSD. And, if you guys are familiar with our beloved Arch Linux, then you will feel right at home. FreeBSD uses the same /etc/rc.conf file for managing the system. Everything is controlled from there although you can do it graphically too but Terminal is recommended. FreeBSD 9.0 was released few days back. This is a perfect OS for servers or power users although it can be installed as a desktop OS too. But still, I recommend PC-BSD to the casual desktop user.

The FreeBSD developers have dedicated the 9.0 release to dmr aka Dennis Ritchie
Here's the official quote from them :-

The FreeBSD Project dedicates the FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE to the memory of Dennis M. Ritchie, one of the founding fathers of the UNIX[tm] operating system. It is on the foundation laid by the work of visionaries like Dennis that software like the FreeBSD operating system came to be. The fact that his work of so many years ago continues to influence new design decisions to this very day speaks for the brilliant engineer that he was.
May he rest in peace.

Quoting from the official Wikipedia article :-

FreeBSD is a complete operating system. The kernel, device drivers, and all of the userland utilities, such as the shell, are held in the same source code revision tracking tree. (This is in contrast to Linux distributions, for which the kernel, userland utilities, and applications are developed separately, and then packaged together in various ways by others.) Third-party application software may be installed using various software installation systems, the two most common being source installation and package installation, both of which use the FreeBSD Ports system.

FreeBSD has been characterized as "the unknown giant among free operating systems" and is widely regarded as reliable and robust. In a Netcraft survey published 1 March 2011, the top three most reliable Web hosting company sites for the month of February 2011 (the most recent month for which figures are available as of March 2011) were all found to be running FreeBSD on their servers.[7]

PC-BSD supports

GNOME


KDE


LXDE


XFCE

& other desktop environments. I've installed PCBSD on my spare 100 GB partition & will be posting a review soon.

So, give either of these great, great distributions a try. Just make sure that it will install only on a PRIMARY PARTITION

Links :-

The FreeBSD Project
PC-BSD

The excellent PCBSD handbook - PC-BSD Users Handbook - PC-BSD Wiki

P.S. :- After the installation of PC-BSD you may not get any sound from the operating system. Their is a workaround.

1. Open a terminal
2. Become super user
3. Navigate to cd /boot/
4. nano loader.conf
5. then paste this

# Enable the sound
snd_hda_load="YES"

[Liverpool_fan]

Tried PC-BSD few years back. Quite a polished distro it was. And implements KDE well which unfortunately so many Linux distros do a poor job of.
BTW Have you tried the NVIDIA proprietary drivers in PC-BSD? IIRC NVIDIA has proprietary drivers for FreeBSD. How is the performance. And same question for Nouveau Gallium3D.

P.S.: Add a screeny.

[hellknight]

I have Palit GTX 260 Core 216 graphics card. It autodetected the graphics card on the first boot and asked me to select the correct resolution of the monitor that I have (AOC F22, Full HD). Then, it wrote the configuration to the xorg.conf file & voila, everything was working. Then after a little searching I found out that PCBSD ships with the propreitary NVIDIA driver. There was full hardware acceleration in the videos although Totem refused to play .mkv files initially but AVI & MP4 worked.

No idea about AMD drivers or Nouveau as I didn't try them. Moreover, the performance was damn awesome. It used only 380 MB RAM with GNOME 2 & Opera open with 10 tabs & that too on a 64-bit system.

There wasn't any problem to mount the NTFS partition. Nautilus mounted them with a single click. There was write support too.

[ico]

I doubt nouveau and ATI R600/700 drivers will work fine in BSD because of lack of KMS. The older Radeon driver for pre HD series GPUs will be fine.

Throughout December, I was playing with FreeBSD 9 RC-1 on my Mac Mini. Removed Mac OS X.

I'll be buying a secondary rig for cheap (10-15k) because the last remaining sample of Pentium 4 in my home is dead. Mac Mini goes to replace that tomorrow. I'll be running BSD exclusively on the new rig.

[hellknight]

Same here.. The 100 GB partition made by me on my second drive was for testing various distributions. But now, FreeBSD or PCBSD will be there on it for a long, long time. Moreover, it is a perfect hosts for all those VirtualBox installations that I do as it consumes very less amount of RAM.

And kudos to you for installing it on Mac Mini. Did everything work? What about the wi-fi chip inside that Mac Mini?

[ico]

No, I didn't bother with Wifi because it has Broadcom . Used Ethernet since it was kept next to the router.

[doomgiver]

wow, someone actually put bsd in their system!!!

congrats!!

[RahulB]

I find Free-BSD cooler than GNU\Linux, much more stable and polished than Linux Distros except perhaps, Linux Mint

[hellknight]

Update :- KDE looks much, much better on PC-BSD than GNOME. Take KDE for a drive, you'll see better fonts & better graphics. Moreover, it autodetected my soundcard when I installed KDE.

[debian]

FreeBSD stands to gain a lot with debian experimenting with the kfreebsd kernel. The applications from debian userland will make BSD strong. The only thing that stops me from using PC-BSD full time is that aweful Mesa/DRI2/KMS support for my Radeon Card. I always buy Radeon cards , to show support for amd's opensource strategy ( unlike Nvidia, who refuse to work on opensource Drivers) and the state of radeon drivers in bsd is not good. I am a great fan of the ZFS file system. Ext4 is nothing in comparison. However with Btrfs coming up, i need not complain.

[ico]

Originally Posted by debian

FreeBSD stands to gain a lot with debian experimenting with the kfreebsd kernel. The applications from debian userland will make BSD strong. The only thing that stops me from using PC-BSD full time is that aweful Mesa/DRI2/KMS support for my Radeon Card. I always buy Radeon cards , to show support for amd's opensource strategy ( unlike Nvidia, who refuse to work on opensource Drivers) and the state of radeon drivers in bsd is not good. I am a great fan of the ZFS file system. Ext4 is nothing in comparison. However with Btrfs coming up, i need not complain.

well, atleast nVidia provides quality proprietary driver for *nix. AMD does not. nVidia provides it for FreeBSD as well. AMD does not.

Catalyst these days works completely fine for me. But as I use Arch, I will not bother with Catalyst as they take ages to support new X.org releases.

I prefer AMD graphic cards as well. But by supporting the development of the Open Source driver while NOT providing a quality proprietary driver doesn't give them any sort of moral high-ground over nVidia. It's an even field.

[Liverpool_fan]

Intel - Crap hardware. Open Source driver only which works.
AMD - Quality hardware. Proprietary drivers lag behind X.org releases and often are buggy. OSS drivers are good and supported by AMD, lag behind for hardware releases though and have poor power management and not performance oriented.
NVIDIA - Quality hardware. Proprietary drivers are great. OSS drivers are decent, but have no support from NVIDIA at all.

There's no graphics solution for Linux which is a win-win purchase in all department.

For FreeBSD though, NVIDIA and Intel are the only choice.

Mind you if you're a gamer in Linux, NVIDIA is truly the only choice no matter what you say.

[hellknight]

OK.. The front jacks are not working. I tried to fiddle with it but still no luck? Any one having such kind of problem?

[hellknight]

I'm getting an error while updating it from the KDE menu. It says connection time out or low disk space. But the internet is working fine. Anybody else is facing this problem or not?

[Liverpool_fan]

Set up FreeBSD with LXDE.
Video playback stutters though, but then didn't expect much with X200 with classic radeon drivers. Really wish for KMS in FreeBSD. Or if someone has a cheap <1k NVIDIA PCI-e graphics card.

[hellknight]

^^You can get GT 210 for Rs. 1500 in the market.. It's good..

[krishnandu.sarkar]

Had fun installing and configuring FreeBSD 9.0

[Prime_Coder]

There is a Bangalore users group listed on the BSD site.

[hellknight]

Will be installing FreeBSD 9.0 today.. Doing a install in Virtualbox under Arch Linux right now..

Finally installed FreeBSD 9.0 with GNOME.. It will be now along with Arch & Windows 7, the permanent operating systems on my desktop. Fonts look a bit messy though, working on them. But, NTFS drives were automatically mounted & I could play almost all the media files.. Sweet

[debian]

Originally Posted by hellknight

Will be installing FreeBSD 9.0 today.. Doing a install in Virtualbox under Arch Linux right now..

Finally installed FreeBSD 9.0 with GNOME.. It will be now along with Arch & Windows 7, the permanent operating systems on my desktop. Fonts look a bit messy though, working on them. But, NTFS drives were automatically mounted & I could play almost all the media files.. Sweet

Thats good mate. No Matter what i did free bsd would not boot from my system ( An old p4 rig dedicated to BSD).Finally i settled with Ghost BSD gnome. Appreciation is also due to the PC-BSD team for coming up with pre-built Vbox and Vmware images.

Originally Posted by Liverpool_fan

Set up FreeBSD with LXDE.
Video playback stutters though, but then didn't expect much with X200 with classic radeon drivers. Really wish for KMS in FreeBSD. Or if someone has a cheap <1k NVIDIA PCI-e graphics card.

Work is under progress for bsd kms. You can get a 8400 gs for very cheap on e-bay.

[Liverpool_fan]

Well that FreeBSD installation in the Pentium 4 config failed, it didn't shut down

Installed it in primary PC with 8800GT with NVIDIA drivers.

Spoiler:

Still many things to be done. Especially the fonts.

[hellknight]

Woah.. That's an awesome wallpaper.. BTW, are your front audio ports working? Mine are not. Apparently, there needs to be some fiddling done with the pin-configuration of the audio drive. And here's my desktop

[Liverpool_fan]

Not tried, don't have a headphone/earphone. Would try with the speakers later on, maybe.
Fonts are not really the greatest yet though, even though they are just passable at this time.

That wallpaper is default KDE wallpaper for FreeBSD btw. I am using its red equivalent.

Spoiler:

HTML5 playback sometimes has weird and repeated pauses though. Not sure why and haven't tried Flash (pesky stuff to use those Linux binaries).

[hellknight]

Install the ubuntu-fonts package from ports. I tried searching Infinality but it wasn't there.. Ubuntu fonts look good..

[prudhivisekhar]

are both free-bsd and open-bsd same in functionality?

[Liverpool_fan]

Originally Posted by prudhivisekhar

are both free-bsd and open-bsd same in functionality?

Not at all.
FreeBSD and NetBSD were derived from 386BSD (from 4.3BSD) and OpenBSD was forked from NetBSD. And they are completely different operating systems.

[Anish]

Hi, I've never tried FreeBSD (interested though ) But tried opensolaris. Can I install FreeBSD along side my windows and linux? I mean I already have dual OS

[hellknight]

^Yeah you can. Just make sure to install it on a primary partition. Then you can add it's entry to GRUB which will boot it.

[Anish]

Originally Posted by hellknight

^Yeah you can. Just make sure to install it on a primary partition. Then you can add it's entry to GRUB which will boot it.

But I have only one partition as primary.
Windows resides in that primary partition,
and two logical drives:
One with linux and one for general storage (NTFS formatted)

So, I have to partition from the logical drive and create another primary to install BSD?
And what bootloader does bsd uses?

[krishnandu.sarkar]

Install it on VirtualBox..!! That's the best way