[TriLUG] BSD users?

Ken Wahl kwahl at nc.rr.com
Fri Aug 12 11:09:20 EDT 2005


On Wed, Aug 10, 2005 at 09:58:36AM -0400, Tom Eisenmenger wrote:
> Not wanting to start a flamewar or anything, but are there any BSD users 
> in Trilug?  I'm thinking of giving DesktopBSD a run, especially since 
> the family PC is now a Mac Mini running Tiger (with a BSD kernel, I 
> believe).
---end quoted text---

I took a hiatus from linux for about a year and a half to run BSD on the
desktop (specifically FreeBSD 5.1, 5.2.1 and then OpenBSD 3.5 and 3.6 -
yes, you can run OpenBSD as a desktop) and found the experience
worthwhile. If your experience will be anything like mine you will find
aspects that you like more or less about linux vs BSD. PC-BSD didn't
exist yet and DesktopBSD was still in it's infancy.

As others have stated, I don't suggest you allow any Mac OS experience
to shape your expectations for xBSD. The difference will be greater than
say running Xandros OS and switching to Debian Unstable. They are really
different animals.

I found FreeBSD to be very stable, fast and friendly as long as you
stuck with the pre-compiled packages from pkg_add. Once you start
upgrading your ports tree by following CURRENT things got flakey and
there would be fairly frequent breakage and hours of frustration after
compiling a huge port to only have it exit "error 1." This flakiness
drove me, along with my interest in its security aspects, to OpenBSD.

OpenBSD installed, configured and ran flawlessly for me even when
compiling all the ports myself. All the ports that weren't marked as
broken did compile without problems. The documentation in its man pages
was superb. I still miss pf, it's packet filter (like iptables) for its
power and human readable syntax. OpenBSD was slightly slower than
FreeBSD or linux but was rock solid stable and probably could've been
run forever until my hardware just wore out and died.

The downside was that OpenBSD is a very spartan environment with limited
ports available (about 2,500 at that time compared to FreeBSD's 11,000)
and multimedia support was less than stellar. I did get mplayer working
with Win32 codecs and had XMMS for mp3's but if you want Amarok,
Kaffeine or anything like that you will be out of luck unless you
compile vanilla sources. There were also no binary updates for OpenBSD
so system updates, if you are following the PATCH branch, had to be
compiled by hand along with the necessary edits to config files in /etc.
There is also no binary java. Installing java was a long tedious process
which required downloading source tarballs directly from sun, linux rpms
from sun to bootstrap the compile process and third party patches. Even
after a successful java build (which was old - 1.3x) many java web
applets wouldn't work correctly, for example, hushmail was out of the
question.

With the notable exception of the mature and helpful community at
bsdforums.org don't expect the same level of community benevolence that
you may have become accustomed to in the linux community. FreeBSD was
more relaxed but ask a question in an OpenBSD list for which there is
already an answer somewhere in the docs and they will roast you with
sadistic pleasure. I stay subscribed to all the OpenBSD lists but never
posted a question because I never really had to. The answers were really
all in the docs.

What brought me back to linux this past April was desire for better
multimedia apps and easier upgrades and binary updates. There was no
flash player for OpenBSD either and for the most part I found a
flash-free diet to be a good thing except when JibJab came out with a
new cartoon ;)

If you intend to convert to BSD for any period of time I suggest you
prepare with some bookage, both from No Starch Press:

For FreeBSD:

Absolute BSD
by Michael Lucas
buy it at a 25% discount at the author's site
http://www.absolutebsd.com

For OpenBSD:

Absolute OpenBSD
by Michael Lucas
Also can be bought through the author's site at 25% discount
http://www.absoluteopenbsd.com

Don't discount NetBSD out of hand either. At the same time I switched
from Free to Open I noticed a good portion of long time Free users
switching to Net and reporting they were happy with it. It seemed to
provide a happy medium of the best of both Free and Open with more
packages and better package management.

While you are tinkering with the idea of BSD you can run a Knoppix-like
liveCD version of FreeBSD called FreeSBIE an iso or iso.torrent of which
can be downloaded from http://www.freesbie.org It includes scripts to
install it to the hard drive if you choose to do so. It is what
originally boosted my interest in BSD.

Good luck on your BSD adventure.

-- 
(the other) Ken



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