# I miss the old man sysinstall!



## teo (Dec 7, 2014)

Hi.

bsdconfig(8) does not configure ports and desktops graphics, and bsdinstall(8) served only to install  the  live ISO of the basic system. Because they eliminated sysintall? It went towards a good job and  made it easier to configure the FreeBSD system on the desktop.


----------



## woodsb02 (Dec 7, 2014)

On the flip side, PKGNG has made it much easier to install packages and desktop graphics manually.


----------



## Oko (Dec 7, 2014)

teo said:


> Hi.
> 
> bsdconfig(8) does not configure ports and desktops graphics, and bsdinstall(8) served only to install  the  live ISO of the basic system. Because they eliminated sysintall? It went towards a good job and  made it easier to configure the FreeBSD system on the desktop.


There is an even easier way to configure FreeBSD on the desktop. Just grab a copy of PC-BSD. Be warned PC-BSD dropped support for UFS so due to root on ZFS the hardware has to be really solid and powerful (64-bit Intel + 16 GB of RAM or more).


----------



## teo (Dec 8, 2014)

Oko said:


> Be warned PC-BSD dropped support for UFS so due to root on ZFS the hardware has to be really solid and powerful (64-bit Intel + 16 GB of RAM or more).


Is the  PC-BSD system that heavy? Worldwide, 80% of computers are 32-bit.


----------



## Oko (Dec 8, 2014)

teo said:


> Is the  PC-BSD system that heavy? Worldwide, 80% of computers are 32-bit.


Yes! ZFS was created for large enterprise data centers, not commodity hardware. Due to memory requirement ZFS in practical terms requires 64-bit registers. PC-BSD in the past had a 32-bit edition but I would not trust my ZFS pool with a 32-bit OS. If you want a cheaper fancy file system I would suggest DragonFlyBSD and HAMMER. However. they also dropped their 32-bit version. However 2 GB of RAM for 2x3TB HAMMER mirror would be plenty enough.

I agree that 80% of computers are 32-bit. The catch-22 is that all those computers are 32-bit ARM based embedded devices. Even ARM is now building 64-bit and it is trying to penetrate the general server market.

If you are trying to run 32-bit Wintel crap, don't bother with ZFS.   FreeBSD has another desktop distribution called GhostBSD http://www.ghostbsd.org/download. They use UFS and have i386 (32-bit edition).


----------



## teo (Dec 8, 2014)

Oko said:


> FreeBSD has another desktop distribution called GhostBSD http://www.ghostbsd.org/download. They use UFS and have i386 (32-bit edition).


Is PC-BSD not intended for end user consumption? Is PC -BSD meant only for enterprise data centers? With this policy I doubt that living. With the GhostBSD 4-RELEASE live ISO X.Org didn't work for me, the screen stayed black.  DesktopBSD was better, but they are in a past version and the system has not been updated. Does PC-BSD administer DesktopBSD?


----------



## Oko (Dec 8, 2014)

teo said:


> PC-BSD is not intended for end user consumption? PC -BSD is meant only for enterprise data centers?


No you can run it on the desktop like this one which runs Red Hat for specific reasons.

```
oko@loom$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:      16287544    2243004   14044540       4776     247300     413568
-/+ buffers/cache:    1582136   14705408
Swap:      8175612     135620    8039992
```


```
oko@loom$ lshw -class cpu
WARNING: you should run this program as super-user.
  *-cpu                
       product: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz
       vendor: Intel Corp.
       physical id: 1
       bus info: cpu@0
       size: 1600MHz
       capacity: 1600MHz
       width: 64 bits
       capabilities: fpu fpu_exception wp vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtscp x86-64 constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx f16c rdrand lahf_lm ida arat epb xsaveopt pln pts tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid fsgsbase smep erms cpufreq
```
And if you wonder I am using a 256 GB SSD 

You can probably get away with less RAM and worse hardware but you get the point. I am not trying to discourage people from running PC-BSD. I was just trying to make a point that PC-BSD requires some real muscle in order to have all that magical ZFS stuff.  The original inventors of ZFS had only large data centers in mind.



teo said:


> GhostBSD 4 RELEASE the live ISO not step X.Org, the screen stayed in black.


I have never tried GhostBSD so I will take your word for it. However at least according to its documentation it uses UFS.



teo said:


> Better DesktopBSD, they are in past version and the system is not updated the sytsem. PC-BSD administers the system DesktopBSD?


You don't know much about BSDs do you DesktopBSD was an independent desktop distribution from Germany which some people tried to revive: http://www.desktopbsd.net/. DesktopBSD is an older distribution than PC-BSD and is absolutely unrelated to it in spite of passionate flame wars we used to have in 2006-2007 PC-BSD was latter acquired by iXsystems, which is the oldest BSD based company in the U.S. (It was founded on the ashes of the Berkeley Research Computing Center.)


----------



## woodsb02 (Dec 8, 2014)

Oko said:


> Be warned PC-BSD dropped support for UFS so due to root on ZFS the hardware has to be really solid and powerful (64-bit Intel + 16 GB of RAM or more).


I run ZFS on my home media server which is a dual core Atom with 4 GB RAM. It works great (it is 64bit), but I just run plexhometheater/XBMC as the interface (no desktop).

I would personally recommend ZFS for laptops/desktops if there is at least 4 GB RAM.


----------



## teo (Dec 8, 2014)

Oko said:


> You don't know much about BSDs do you DesktopBSD was an independent desktop distribution from Germany which some people tried to revive: http://www.desktopbsd.net/. DesktopBSD is an older distribution than PC-BSD and is absolutely unrelated to it in spite of passionate flame wars we used to have in 2006-2007 PC-BSD was latter acquired by iXsystems



Something is of BSD, that's why I said of DesktopBSD. With respect to the independent desktop distribution from Germany which some people tried to revive. Of course, its creator was a German and for personnel reasons he left the entire system based on FreeBSD, it was a question of knowing  who administers. But 16 GB, so much RAM for PC-BSD? It is a complete waste.

_[translation attempted -- mod.]_


----------



## jrm@ (Dec 9, 2014)

Up until recently I was also running ZFS (root and only filesystem) on a laptop with an SSD and 4 GB of RAM.  It performed quite well.  After putting in another 4 GB of RAM I didn't really notice much difference.

ADDED: I run a memory monitor in my tray and I rarely see it go above 2 or 3 GB now that I have 8 GB of RAM (unless I run VirtualBox).  Here is a screenshot to confirm.  In the tray, from the left there is the hostname (PHE), CPU stats, then after *M* is the memory usage.  That's 2 GB with Firefox, Emacs and a bunch of other applications running.  I calculate the memory usage as 
	
	



```
total memory - (inactive count + free count + cache count)*(page size)
```
 For low memory systems, check out this ZFS tuning guide.


----------



## woodsb02 (Dec 10, 2014)

jrm said:


> I run a memory monitor in my tray and I rarely see it go above 2 or 3 GB now that I have 8 GB of RAM (unless I run VirtualBox). Here is a screenshot to confirm. In the tray, from the left there is the hostname (PHE), CPU stats, then after *M* is the memory usage. That's 2 GB with Firefox, Emacs and a bunch of other applications running. I calculate the memory usage as
> 
> 
> 
> ...



What tray bar and window manager are you using? Looks nice.


----------



## Crivens (Dec 10, 2014)

I have run ZFS with 2 GB of memory, and also had no problem with that. But you will need a 64 bit machine, that is clear. While more memory is better for ZFS, the sweet spot is not that high. After upgrading to 4 GB, I see no real difference while working. When playing, which means VirtualBox, there is a slight improvement.


----------



## jrm@ (Dec 10, 2014)

woodsb02 said:


> What tray bar and window manager are you using? Looks nice.


It's the mode-line, which is part of StumpWM.  If you try StumpWM out, I'd recommend installing SBCL and StumpWM itself manually.  The port is ancient and it would take a lot of work with other ports to fix it.


----------

