# Experiment: Installing FreeBSD directly (instead of True OS)



## mikepwagner (Oct 31, 2016)

I have old Latitude E6510 with an oldish nvidia card. When I tried to install True OS, it wasn't happy with my video card - and there was a notice on the True OS download page to the effect that legacy NVIDIA card were not supported.

I decided to try and install freeBSD directly, since I saw that there was a nvidia driver that supported my card: nvidia-driver-340.

It has been 20 or more years  since I worked in a UNIX kernel, and even then it was a file system for DG/UX - I have never been all that knowledgeable about UNIX user space, and user space has changed a lot in those decades.

To be honest, I also wasn't really interested in a new hobby - I had this old laptop sitting around, and it seemed a waste to not be able to at least use it for browsing and email.

So I decided to see how hard it was to to a working system. 

The answer is in: it was a piece of cake. With the help on these forums, I was able to get get the nvidia-driver-340 enabled, install firefox, and get my wireless HP OfficeJet 8100 working.

I also added some music engraving software to play with - lilypond and frescobaldi. Eventullay I will add gnucash.

I can't tell you how delighted I am over the ease of this process.

Very cool.

Thanks to all who helped.

Mike


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## SirDice (Oct 31, 2016)

mikepwagner said:


> I can't tell you how delighted I am over the ease of this process.


It's mostly because of the excellent ports system. Granted, it has its problems and quirks but overall it usually just works pretty much out of the box.


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## Atsuri (Oct 31, 2016)

I am actually happy for you OP. Good that things worked out just as you have planned . I too am a very happy FreeBSD user .


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## mikepwagner (Oct 31, 2016)

SirDice said:


> It's mostly because of the excellent ports system. Granted, it has its problems and quirks but overall it usually just works pretty much out of the box.



Yes, this is what made it work. I had run PC-BSD several years ago, so I had some notion of the ports and packaging system, albeit through App Cafe (I think that was the name of the graphical interface).

I didn't the port system any more cumbersome than App Cafe. I am not disparaging App Cafe (or PC-BSD), it could well be that even though I don't consider myself very UNIX literate, I know more than I think that I know, and that the command line interface to pkg or ports is a significant barrier to a lot of people.

But, for me at least, the ports system has been ridiculously easy to use.

Mike


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## drhowarddrfine (Oct 31, 2016)

mikepwagner said:


> and get my wireless HP OfficeJet 8100 working.


You probably had better luck than I do getting and keeping our 8600 working on Windows.


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## SirDice (Oct 31, 2016)

mikepwagner said:


> I didn't the port system any more cumbersome than App Cafe.


It was one of the things that attracted me to FreeBSD back in the 3.0 days. Most linux distrubutions at that time had no repositories (at least none I can remember) and building, for example, Apache from source by hand was just plain horrid. I kept running into things, needing library X, needing library Y, etc. After building library X something else broke that also used it. Horrible dependency hell. On FreeBSD I only needed to `cd /usr/ports/www/apache && make install` and _everything_ got correctly built. I never looked back since.


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