Sept 17 2011
Next on my journey is FreeBSD. I have always wanted to try out a BSD flavor, I think it sounds really enticing, and I feel that it (along with the other BSD flavors) remain truer descendents of UNIX than Linux/GNU variants.
Not that that really matters, but I find it interesting.
The FreeBSD installer seems like it is very well put together. I've used Linux for a long time, but I have never touched BSD so I was a bit unfamiliar with some of the options here.
The installer process reminded me a bit of the Arch linux installer. I was walked through the entire install process and guided into what should be chosen (most of which I left as the defaults).
I was messing up a bit by not configuring my network interface properly, which turned out to be really easy once I figured out how to do it--the wired connection anyway.
After the install and reboot, I was dropped into a console prompt (similar to Arch) and then the fun began. I installed X11, which was amazingly simple -- A simple "pkg_add -r X11" (maybe it was xorg, but you get the idea), and X was installed. startx actually brought up X on the first try with no configuration. Then I installed and setup XDM with one line change, and all of that worked as well. I was impressed.
The desktop environments available in FreeBSD seem kind of limited, but maybe I wasn't looking at all of them. I noted Gnome and KDE of course, and XFCE. I passed by enlightenment and awesome WMs.
I decided to install XFCE and give it a go. And not surprisingly enough, that went well, too!
FreeBSD has a ports tree, much like Gentoo (and Arch) which allows you to compile and install from source from the skeleton tree of makefiles and patches and things.
This is really neat, but much like I said in the Sabayon post, I don't really care for building things from source. Nothing wrong with it, but it just isn't for me--if there is anything I am ever short on (besides money) it is time!
Using the Ports Collection is very simple and straightforward. I install Firefox and Opera, and the flash plugin, both of which are native FreeBSD software. The flash plugin, however, is not, so it has to be run though a linux emulator which is also installed with the ports tree.
The ports tree can be updated with a csvup tool "csup", and the ports themselves can be upgraded using a few different tools.
Now, this is a laptop that I am running this on, so I naturally need wireless. D'oh! I have been wired this whole time, and my wifi is not working out of the gate. So I have to find my card and install the driver and setup all of this wireless stuff. Not surprising, but this is irritating in this day and age. This is the point where I am currently.
One thing that I can definitely go ahead and say about FreeBSD is that the FreeBSD Handbook is a great source of information, and seems to cover just about everything I can think of. I like the layout of the ArchWiki better, but this has information for everything I have searched for so far.
Off to get my wifi working.... I'll continue a little later.
Alrighty. It has been several hours, and I had decided to update my system before I tried to enable the wireless.
It has taken literally hours to do this update via PortUpgrade. Downloading, compiling, installing. Tiresome.
That is about all it takes for me to realize this is not for me. I don't have the time to handle this.
I will say that FreeBSD would be great to try on a desktop system, I don't think I will stick with it on the laptop. This just takes too long.
I may install FreeBSD on my server, or on a desktop system at some point, but I am keeping it off of my laptop. That's just me though, I'm sure it would work fine if I was more patient.
Moving on...I think I am going to try OpenSuse next. I haven't used OpenSuse in several years, I am excited to give it a go.
