the FreeBSD thread

hellknight

BSD init pwns System V
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
*wiki.pcbsd.org/images/1/1e/Gnome1.png

KDE
*wiki.pcbsd.org/images/9/90/Kde.png

LXDE
*wiki.pcbsd.org/images/3/36/Lxde1.png

XFCE
*wiki.pcbsd.org/images/5/5e/Xfce2.png
& 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"
 
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Liverpool_fan

Sami Hyypiä, LFC legend
re: FreeBSD 9.0 & PC-BSD 9.0 released

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.
 
OP
hellknight

hellknight

BSD init pwns System V
re: FreeBSD 9.0 & PC-BSD 9.0 released

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

Super Moderator
Staff member
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. :mrgreen:

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.
 
OP
hellknight

hellknight

BSD init pwns System V
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

Super Moderator
Staff member
No, I didn't bother with Wifi because it has Broadcom :(. Used Ethernet since it was kept next to the router.
 

RahulB

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

hellknight

BSD init pwns System V
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

Broken In
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

Super Moderator
Staff member
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

Sami Hyypiä, LFC legend
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.
 
OP
hellknight

hellknight

BSD init pwns System V
OK.. The front jacks are not working. I tried to fiddle with it but still no luck? Any one having such kind of problem?
 
OP
hellknight

hellknight

BSD init pwns System V
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

Sami Hyypiä, LFC legend
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. ;)
 
OP
hellknight

hellknight

BSD init pwns System V
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

Broken In
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.

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.
 
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