The FreeBSD thread

[hellknight]

I haven't seen a single thread about FreeBSD in this forum. So I thought that we can start a new thread & post our experiences in this thread. Fellow FreeBSD users can also post their experiences with the OS in this thread.

I've been using FreeBSD since last couple of days. It really, is a mind blowing operating system. I'm posting my hardware details here :-

AMD Athlon II X4 640
Biostar TA 790 GX BE - everything detected
Palit GTX 260 Sonic - working out-of-box, installed NVIDIA driver and got compiz working,
Sound - had to add snd_hda_enable="YES" to /boot/loader.conf to get it working.
AOC F22 Monitor - Full resolution detected.

NTFS filesystem can be read. I'll search for the write support and post the result here.

I'm using 64-bit FreeBSD 8.2 right now..

 

[Rahim]

Please can you tell me what is the different in using FreeBSD and any other Linux distro? I once used FreeBSD with KDE 4 and found it the same as any other distro.

 

[Garbage]

@Rahim, BSD is a different kernel. So as Linux. So as Windows and So as Mac (Darwin).

FYI Linux is NOT a operating system. You can call Ubuntu an OS which uses Linux kernel.

And according to FreeBSD website - FreeBSD: An Open Source Alternative to Linux

 

[hellknight]

Actually, FreeBSD is a complete operating system.. Garbage rightly pointed out that Linux is a kernel. Moreover, FreeBSD relies on BSD license, which is liberal than the GPL license. But companies like Apple, take their hard-owned code and build empires ..

FreeBSD tends to favor stability over bleeding-edge. The software in FreeBSD are either compiled from ports (like Gentoo) or can be installed as binaries..

 

[skeletor]

I used FreeBSD for two months around 2.5 years ago. Might start using it again once I get time and bandwidth.

 

[Rahim]

I know what FreeBSD is. Does it feel different than any other distro? Speed, stability etc. WHat about common applications that we use.

 

[Liverpool_fan]

Actually, FreeBSD is a complete operating system.. Garbage rightly pointed out that Linux is a kernel. Moreover, FreeBSD relies on BSD license, which is liberal than the GPL license. But companies like Apple, take their hard-owned code and build empires ..

That's why I consider it more "free" than GPL with a fine print. It's allowance of the freedom to take others' freedom away can be arguably called less free.
Anyway personally I tend to refer to the GNU + Linux stack as just Linux, so it's OS for me anyhow.

Back to topic, I have only used PC-BSD, a "distro" of FreeBSD, it was pretty slick, but found no reason to jump to it.

BTW which file system are you using with FreeBSD? ZFS?

I know what FreeBSD is. Does it feel different than any other distro? Speed, stability etc. WHat about common applications that we use.

You can run Linux apps in FreeBSD.

 

[hellknight]

Yeah.. Linux apps can run without any trouble via the installation of Linux compatibility layer.. Coming back to filesystems, I wanted to use ZFS but there was no option in the FreeBSD 8.2 installer.. But PC-BSD installer has ZFS option.. Moreover, with the release of PC-BSD 9.0, they'll include GNOME along with KDE.. Looking forward to that release..

All the apps that are present in Linux's edition of GNOME are available for FreeBSD.. speed is terrific, it uses very little RAM, using around 300 Megs with Opera running. Stability is legendary as the top three sites according to Netcraft run on FreeBSD.

 

[Liverpool_fan]

Yeah FreeBSD is the epitome of stability, just like OpenBSD for security, and NetBSD for portability

 

[cute.bandar]

no experience with freebsd (didn't have the patience to download a 2gb dvd) , but had a bad bad experience with Pcbsd.
From what I could figure out, the PCBSD installer's partition software , couldn't even create new partition's from unallocated space. i ended up wiping my HDD through that partition manager(probably my mistake) , but my point is that in my experience PCBSD's installer was terrible.

 

[Liverpool_fan]

You were probably trying to install it to a logical drive. You can only make use of UFS or ZFS, FreeBSD's native filesystems, ONLY on a primary partition.

 

[hellknight]

^Exactly.. It will only install on a primary partition, but you can see other logical drives after the installation..

Another good feature of FreeBSD is that it makes a slice (partition) in which all the other partitions which are essential to FreeBSD are store.. for example / & swap are included inside the UFS (Unix file system) slice..