FreeBSD 10

K

krogen

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 22, 2009
Messages
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FreeBSD 10 is just about out.

Anyone here use FreeBSD? Any opinions or thoughts on it?

I've been a Linux user for quite a few years now but have never tried BSD. I'm considering it but with so little commercial support it's rather tough - I'd have to dual boot my current distribution to use some software.
 
I use FreeBSD on almost all of my UNIX-like systems. There are a few cases where commercial software only supports linux, and in those cases I tend to run CentOS.

Note that I don't run it on the desktop, its primarily a server OS for me.
 
Isn't there a binary compatibility layer for running Linux programs on FreeBSD?
 
I use freebsd in places that I'd like to "set and forget". Things like my router.
 
jwcalla said:
Isn't there a binary compatibility layer for running Linux programs on FreeBSD?
Click to expand...

Yes. It works fine for most applications. It won't work for applications that require proprietary linux kernel extensions since FreeBSD doesn't run a full linux kernel compatibility layer but for most userland applications it does a good job.
 
I've been using FreeBSD off and on since about 2.2.7. My storage server, that's been up for about, well, not sure-over a year, maybe two years--well, it's running FreeBSD 9-something. It's a little behind, and needs to be updated. Anyway, the bottom line is, FreeBSD is a great OS. I think they just recently celebrated their 20th year.
 
FreeBSD is a great OS! FreeNAS is pretty solid for a storage server and GhostBSD is sweet for desktops/workstations. PC-BSD is also fantastic for desktops/workstations. I have and run all of these at home. I haven't tried 10-RELEASE just yet but the RC was fine.
 
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FreeBSD has the FreeBSD Handbook which makes life a lot easier starting out. I enjoy it (I have a ZFS server box in the basement :))
 
i love me some freebsd. the documentation is awesome
 
I tried the RC5 on my desktop yesterday. I have never tried BSD before.

The installation was painless and quite straight forward. It was step-by-step text based. One thing I did have an issue with - when the installer asked what should be installed, the sources were unchecked, and so I left it at that.

After installing kde and xserver with the pkg tool, I tried to install the nvidia driver, which was available from ports. The installer complained about sources being missing. From what I could gather, the fix to this was to check them out with svn or cvs. The FreeBSD handbook didn't mention anything about this. I decided to re-install instead.

After re-installing the system, installing the nvidia driver went okay. During the driver installation, I noticed a whole bunch of RPMs being downloaded. I had Linux compatibility set to on. This was rather odd, why would this installation process need some Linux RPMs?

Anyways, I finally had kde running... But... The mouse was not working (mx518) and so I had to manually tweak the x config file, which I didn't have to do for at least a couple years with Linux distributions (hald and dbus were running).

After getting the mouse to work, I noticed sound was not working. I have a ~7 year old X-Fi Music which was pulled from some Dell PC, so it might be some kind of slightly custom version. Anyways, this card has been working for a couple of years with Linux distros (I think the alsa drivers have been made available in 2009). No driver available for FreeBSD. From what I could gather, the oss port might have worked, but I did not try it.

I removed FreeBSD and re-installed Arch. My only goal was to screw around with FreeBSD, perhaps to use it if everything went super smoothly, but it didn't.
 
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