Wednesday, February 18, 2009

FreeBSD 7.1 - A Review

Today I installed FreeBSD 7.1 on a Ultra Sparc 5 box, and decided to review it so the blog doesnt look so blank. The Sparc release doesnt get the snazzy boot loader or nothing, but is secure and stable as a rock, when configured right. Using pkg_add things go nicely. It happens to be just like urpmi or apt-get, just a tad more advanced. If you use Solaris (not openSolaris) then this should be a breeze for you. pkg_add -r kde and DING DING DING dinners ready :) .

The installer is pretty straight-forward, but I am not able to get screenshots, sorry. Its a text installer, and a CRT monitor, so screenies are about impossible. But, I used the boot-only disc, set up partitions, the network (static ip, here) and what packages I wanted installed, and it did its thing for about 15 or 20 minutes, while I made the floor vibrate thanks to the mp3's I had playing on my Kubuntu 8.04 LTS desktop with my subwoofer and Altec Lansing speakers. :) If you install the Xorg-KernDev group like I did the total install is about 45 mins or so, like Linux. No bigee.

The bigee comes when you dont know what groups to add your user to and then when you do su - in bsd it flunks out. >:( Solve: Add your user(s) to the wheel group. Either through install OR through the PW command (see FreeBSD Handbook).

And I have no clue WHAT happened here, but something screwed my /boot directory so I had to reinstall the dang thing. I think it may just be the computer I installed it on, because its power has been snippy for a while now. But now it flickers a lot. Whatever. X11 works, once installed, but I could not login so somewhere its those dag-nabbit groups again to let me login through X.

None the less, it is pretty stable if you have a stable computer, and overall I give it about a 5.7/10. I'll probably still be stickin with Ubuntu and Arch Linux =).

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