FreeBSD as a day-to-day usage computing environment
Note: I will soon be rewriting/replacing this article, with a more guide-like article, describing FreeBSD on the desktop and setting it up. I've buggered around with my current configuration so much that it is becoming a little flaky, so to speak. I will also be writing an article about OpenBSD as a desktop/workstation configuration and again, will make it fairly guide-like, to give you a rough overview of how to set it up for yourself. Please be aware that these guides will not be complete word for word walkthroughs. I will cover every part of the procedures, but I won't be holding your hand and giving copy and paste instructions. As I have written elsewhere on this site, these are things that you should learn for yourself, if you want to be running FreeBSD or OpenBSD. I would be doing you no service, if I helped you to get a *BSD environment that you have very little understanding of, would I? It has to be said, this recent flakiness that I am experiencing with FreeBSD is becoming very frustrating. By flaky, I mean complete lock-ups, forcing me to hit the reset button. It seems to have kicked in since I made some minor changes and then, as a result of the system hangs, undid those changes. Unfortunately, I still get the system hangs, which is very confusing. I have experienced the exact same thing a couple of months ago and it only went away when I re-installed FreeBSD completely, wiping the hard disk. I'm loathe to do this again and will be moving my desktop needs to OpenBSD at the first opportunity. With luck, these problems will stop there and I can get back to using my systems again, rather than trying to debug them half the time.
My first taster of a BSD system has been FreeBSD, on my AthlonXP based, main computer. I'm fussy about what I use on a day-to-day basis and pretty demanding in the range of facilities I have at my immediate disposal. I use my PC for a host of things, from maintaining my LAN and servers, to browsing the net, downloading, burning discs usually from ISO but occasionally from a set of files. I email, listen to and watch online audio and video streams and maybe some light recreation, via some of the Windows based games I own, that I manage to get running through Wine or Cedega, or whatever I can find for Linux. In short, I use it for a lot of stuff. It's built for the purpose, having 60Gig & 120Gig ATA133 hard disks, Pioneer slot loader DVD reader, NEC dual layer DVD rewriter, SBLive1024 sound card, Hauppage WinTV card, kitting it out for my needs. The AthlonXP is a 2600+ model and it's got 1Gig of PC2700 DDR, in dual channel configuration. For my purposes, it rocks. Gaming graphics are provided by a cheap and cheerful Inno3D GeForce 5200 nVidia card with 128MB of on-board memory. Ubuntu always seems a tad sluggish on it, even with the k7 specific kernel. Using FreeBSD 5.4 Release and the stock i386 kernel, I'm very happy with the performance. After getting the latest nVidia driver in place, glxgears has gone through the roof, compared to Ubuntu. I'd like to point out at this stage, that even the slightly sluggish Ubuntu, is noticeably faster in general operation than Windows XP on the same hardware. I might have tweaked a little, here and there, but nothing drastic.
Package and port installation hasn't been too bad, successfully getting mplayer, the win32-codecs and the mozilla-mplayer plugin components, with little extra work, to resolve some dependency / filecheck issues. There was a problem with the Blue and Blue-small skins packages, to I sorted them out separately and they're done. Now I can tune-in to my favourite football club's audio and video streams, which are in bloody Microsoft proprietary formats, wmv/asf, which really pisses me off. Thankfully the people at mplayerhq have worked very hard to allow us non Windoze users a chance. Getting IDE/Atapi CD & DVD burning going was a little tricky at first, but I muddled through and once I knew what I was doing, turned out to be surprisingly simple. To be fair, it's the most straight forward custom kernel I've ever built, on any OS. So now I have the excellent k3b working perfectly, so I can add to my growing Linux/Unix/*BSD distro collection. This is an out of the box affair in most Linux distros, but FreeBSD being what it is, hasn't implemented CD/DVD writing on IDE/Atapi drives, as yet. I do hear, however, that it should be there for the next release.
FreeBSD 5.4 is a very impressive distribution, widely supported, relatively simple to install and appears logical in it's layout and the way it goes together and boots. Adding packages and ports, customising my environment has been easily achievable, I can't say simple, as it's all been new to me. pkg_add is sufficient for my needs and helps in my withdrawal from apt-get and it's even fluffier GUI Synaptic, that I had grown so dependant on in Debian based Linux distributions. In fact, I feel that the pkg_add and make from ports, ways of doing things are only marginally more complex to carry out, than the Debian way, whilst being more informative and actually teaching you something about what's going on and what you are doing. That's not to detract from Debian based distros, which I rate very highly and might retain some machines running them. I would advise anybody new to Linux, to go for a Debian based distribution, Ubuntu is a great starting point for desktop usage, Debian Sarge 3.1 makes a great, stable, efficient(ish) and relatively easy to administer server OS. Get a copy of the net-install CD, and follow the Sarge server How-To at Falko Timme's Website. Importantly, there are plenty of resources for those two, when you want help or advice, complete walkthrough HowTo guides, like Falko's, there are plenty dotted around the Internet. I feel that Debian is a good base for Linux noobs. You can run a Sarge server and be able to get a good feel for how Linux works. From there it is easy to move over to another distribution if your needs manage to outgrow what will run on Debian. Once you have a good understanding of Linux, moving to a UNIX or BSD based platform is a whole lot easier. BSD probably wouldn't make a good base to be learning from, unless you like the in at the deep end approach.
Me? Well, I've ran Debian based distros for some time now and really like them. I run them on my families' machines and currently on my web and mail server. However, the BSD ethics have me hooked and the BSD licence is more to my liking, so I've migrated my own workstation over to FreeBSD and so far have lost nothing that I enjoyed under Linux. I'm in the process of migrating my server resources to OpenBSD for the added security. I may still run a Sarge server as an intranet server and main mail server, but behind some firewalls and in a more secure zone to my main web server. This will enable me to stay fresh on Debian systems, which I feel important, due to their popularity and quick and easy setup. Debian Sarge and Ubuntu have each impressed me in their own ways. Sarge makes a good little server, Ubuntu is very flexible and very widely supported. My missus and kids love it too, being as it is, very easy to use and full of features. No Windows machines, no virus problems and no more headaches, all of which you have to pay M$ for. Ubuntu, Debian Sarge, FreeBSD and OpenBSD are all hugely more secure and stable than anything I've ever seen from Microsoft and they're all FREE! Why you'd ever want to run Windows, other than the latest mainstream games, is beyond me. Even then, you're far better off having a console for your gaming, it's far less of a hassle than gaming in Windows and you get to turn your PC into a real computer, without being a slave to the software industry.
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