Re: [OT] FreeBSD trial follow up
- From: George Peter Staplin <georgepsSPAMMENOT@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2008 08:55:10 +0000 (UTC)
sk8r-365 wrote:
Firstly, like to thank all who replied to my previous OT post on this
same subject.
Secondly, I've no intension to offend some out there who are fans of FBSD.
After a whirlwind 5 day, between work and sleep, go at FreeBSD and
DesktopBSD I have this to report:
the negative side of FreeBSD -
good thing I knew how to setup X even though I chose for X to be
installed. Plus, glad I made certain, or chose to have, installed a
text-only browser because I needed to check on a few steps to do X setup
the FreeBSD way in console.
there's a great app called portmaster but it's flow of updating is
interrupted by required user answers; this can be good for a short
upgrade and is tedious over a 24+ hour upgrade because everything stops
until the user answers a question ... there were a lot of stoppages.
Openoffice - a *must* have - failed to complete compiling because of
JAVA licence restrictions ... may not be a FreeBSD fault but a show
stopper for me and not a problem on Linux. Yes, I tried the flag for no
JAVA, too. nVidia wouldn't properly compile.
If you don't like compiling packages, you might prefer OpenBSD. They
encourage their users to use prebuilt packages, much like Debian.
Though you'd be out of luck with 3D acceleration for an Nvidia card.
You could use the non-accelerated nv driver, or VESA.
I hate t/csh and adore bash. The default ain't bash. Was easy enough to
change to a bash shell for a user, but the users' passwd is not carried
over when doing so. Oops!, had to add passwd via root authority. BTW,
root has to use t/csh, I think it was tcsh - not as easy to navigate
once accustomed to using BCKSPC and DEL keys in bash. Changing roots'
shell is not a direct act on /etc/passwd file... tried that but it kept
on reverting. Same thing happened using GNOME's User Manager application.
Tried chsh? I think FreeBSD has that, just like Linux. If not perhaps
vipw would work.
DesktopBSD had most everything ready ... need to set up printers and
some mount stuff, but that's simple enough. However, OOo2.3 crashed
every time I tried to load a MS Excel spread sheet. If you like KDE, I
prefer GNOME, you'll appreciate that KDE is DesktopBSD's default.
nVidia wouldn't properly compile.
That must be frustrating with OpenOffice. It could be caused by an
OpenOffice bug, a syscall behavior expectation, a different address
space layout... (it's probably an OOo2.3 bug)
The nvidia drivers can be a pain, even in Linux using the official
installer that builds a module when one can't be found online.
On the plus side -
FreeBSD is free!, has about 14,000+ apps to chose from; even with KDE up
and several apps going there were but 72 procs in use. Dunno how they do
it, but the memory is *well* managed.
A lot of those may be kernel threads/tasks.
Think if I had more time, esp. for OpenOffice, it would be a good
alternative to Linux - anything beats MS!. Unfortunately, time is
against me.
So, if you're wanting to give FBSD a try, get ready to read - that's a
good thing always - set aside two weeks to tinker/tweak it and be
patient. If I had more time, all problems would have been reconciled.
Debian is soooo quick and easy to set up - 1 hour and it's done.
Nod.
It's good to give different systems a try. Most have some strengths and
weaknesses in comparison to GNU/Linux.
George
.
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