# FreeBSD on a desktop



## lorenzo (Jul 3, 2011)

Hi guys,

I'm new of this forum, I want to ask you a question. This morning I decided to change OS, actually I'm an Arch Linux user, but I'm studying computer programming and I think I'm wasting too much time learning how to configure my system rather then to program. I'm looking for stable, comfortable and flexible operating system that allows me to program and that works correctly without strange errors or too many configurations.

Is FreeBSD a good choice? Else, I downloaded the Debian ISO.

Thank you.


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## graudeejs (Jul 3, 2011)

Yes, FreeBSD is excellent choice.
But you will need to learn something new anyway.

But one thing FreeBSD is very good at is stability 

Good place to start:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/


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## lorenzo (Jul 3, 2011)

Thank you for your answer.


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## graudeejs (Jul 3, 2011)

Perhaps you should tell more in details what software do you need and some other requirements.
Who knows maybe you need some exotic programming language/IDE that isn't available?


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## lorenzo (Jul 4, 2011)

> Perhaps you should tell more in details what software do you need and some other requirements.


Fortunately, I haven't particular requirement, I use just common softwares, like vim and some compilers.

BTW, yesterdey I installed FreeBSD on my laptop, actually I have some issues with the X Server, but I'm reading the Handbook you suggested me to solve it.

I found this system quite similar to Arch Linux and other Linux system, except some configuration files (like rc.conf ...).


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## graudeejs (Jul 4, 2011)

In general Unixes are quite similar.
However the longer you use FreeBSD, the more love you will have 

I myself as most of forum members here are ex-Linux user.

If you can't solve your problem with X, just open new thread, and we'll help you


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## Martillo1 (Jul 4, 2011)

As for multimedia (flash and youtube) A fast and temporary solution is installing an emulator like emulators/virtualbox-ose and run a spare copy of XP.

(ducking for cover)


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## fonz (Jul 4, 2011)

Martillo1 said:
			
		

> As for multimedia (flash and youtube) A fast and temporary solution is installing an emulator like emulators/virtualbox-ose and run a spare copy of XP.


Here on FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE all I had to do was installing www/linux-f10-flashplugin10. Opera even picked it up right away, without the symlink trickery that was needed in the past.

Fonz


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## akregator (Jul 4, 2011)

Virtualbox with XP virtual machine a fast solution? Don't think it's faster than go to ports and make flash.

But, if you want to configure your system: Debian. but I think FreeBSD, and perhaps all others BSD systems, are much more stable than any Linux distribution. But you can have some problems with hardware so be careful before trying to install.

I've a friend who studies computer programming too and when he tried to go on Linux he was bored, bored and bored.


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## randux (Jul 4, 2011)

I don't know how you will be able to stand Debian after using Arch. Arch has a rolling release and keeps pretty current, it is very similar to the FreeBSD model. FreeBSD has tons and tons of ports and packages. I am a Slacker but I like the big 3 BSD also. I tried Debian a few times and wanted to throw my machine out the window like I do whenever I have to spend 5 minutes on a Windows box.

Debian is not a distro for coders, imho. It's a good server distro and an ok enterprise desktop distro. It's intentionally backlevel, safe and stable but boring and I personally hate the package management. If you want newish gcc and other compilers you won't find them on Debian, even unstable is going to lag behind FreeBSD ports if history continues. It all depends on what you like. For a development desktop FreeBSD is hard to beat. I would say only Slackware beats it ;-)


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## Martillo1 (Jul 4, 2011)

Well, I should have added "dirty" to the other two epithets :r

P.D.: I do not like Linux compatibility elements intalled in my system, if I would, I had just stayed with my ArchLinux system as I have done for the last seven years, and that is not the case.


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## namor (Jul 8, 2011)

FreeBSD certainly isn't the perfect choice for all laptop systems. The number one reason I wouldn't suggest it to anyone ad-hoc is hardware support. If you don't have a valid BIOS, you might have ACPI problems. If you don't have a well supported WLAN device, expect it not to work at all or crash the system. If you wish to protect the data on your laptop from theft (when the laptop's stolen), either spend a day reading how to install FreeBSD by hand or use Linux. All major Linux distros I've used some time ago let you use full disk encryption out of the box. Sysinstall (from 8.2-RELEASE) doesn't.

You said you come from Arch. Prepare to have a hard start configuring your new BSD system and getting used to reading man pages exhaustively. There are plenty of WTF moments like "WTF, USB storage shows up as a device, but I can't see any partitions?!" "A: You'll have to load the MBR module yourself on a GPT system..." or "WTF: Why does mount fail with obscure internal errors? Wasn't this partition FAT32? Even BSD should be able to mount THAT!" "A: mount isn't smart enough to figure out the formatting itself, pass it -t msdosfs. (BTW: great if someone gives you an USB stick but forgot what FS is one it. ;-) )"

But, as killasmurf said, you'll start to love the system anyways. I'd rather call it Stockholm Syndrome, though.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jul 8, 2011)

@namor - Those are a lot of "ifs". IF my laptop is supported, and two of mine are as well as a lot of people's here, then there are no such issues.


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## DutchDaemon (Jul 8, 2011)

It's obvious that all that pampering makes for a continually perplexed admin when the pampering stops.


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## namor (Jul 8, 2011)

drhowarddrfine said:
			
		

> @namor - Those are a lot of "ifs". IF my laptop is supported, and two of mine are as well as a lot of people's here, then there are no such issues.



Yeah, IF  only I had one of those.. My good old Dell laptop's DSDTs don't even compile with a recent iasl My friends HP consumer laptops were supported even worse, though.
@topic: Still, IMO using FreeBSD on a laptop - even if not fully supported - makes a lot of sense if you wish to learn about Unix/BSD.



			
				DutchDaemon said:
			
		

> It's obvious that all that pampering makes for a continually perplexed admin when the pampering stops.



Haha, I couldn't agree more.
If that (having a perplexed admin in the end) is good/worth it is another question.


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## kpedersen (Jul 8, 2011)

It seems that you will need to be learning something new whether you stick with Arch Linux or change to FreeBSD. I read on Arch's website that they have completely changed their blacklist system so rather than using *!module* in /etc/rc.conf you need to start messing about with linux's ugly modprobe files.

Luckily FreeBSD very rarely has changes this extensive because it does not rely on an external project's kernel. It is in complete control of it's own development.

From personal experience, I have found the hardware support on FreeBSD to be consistently better than linux. I found different versions of different linux distros always broke something lol.

So FreeBSD on your desktop? Go for it!


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## d_mon (Jul 18, 2011)

randux said:
			
		

> I don't know how you will be able to stand Debian after using Arch. Arch has a rolling release and keeps pretty current, it is very similar to the FreeBSD model



totally agree! :thumb up:


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## d_mon (Jul 18, 2011)

kpedersen said:
			
		

> So FreeBSD on your desktop? Go for it!



OK! but the Achillesâ€™ heel on BSD is flash...:OOO


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## fonz (Jul 18, 2011)

d_mon said:
			
		

> OK! but the Achillesâ€™ heel on BSD is flash...:OOO


Sure used to be, but it seems to be working pretty well now.

Fonz


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## vermaden (Jul 19, 2011)

d_mon said:
			
		

> OK! but the Achillesâ€™ heel on BSD is flash...:OOO



Works well on my box under COMPAT_LINUX.


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## ahavatar (Jul 19, 2011)

fonz said:
			
		

> Sure used to be, but it seems to be working pretty well now.
> 
> Fonz



I second this. Flash used to be buggy on FreeBSD in the past, but there were some breakthoughs recently, and I have absolutely no problem with it for more than a month on my FreeBSD system.


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## YZMSQ (Jul 19, 2011)

d_mon said:
			
		

> OK! but the Achillesâ€™ heel on BSD is flash...:OOO


Well, I think the video card support, for instance, Intel and ATI, and wireless issues are the so-called "heel".:\


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## d_mon (Jul 19, 2011)

randux said:
			
		

> Arch has a rolling release



debian also!


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## vermaden (Jul 19, 2011)

d_mon said:
			
		

> debian also!



I am not a big Debian fan but isnt it released every 2 years or so with new version like 3.0, 4.0, 5.0? (not rolling release)


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## jrm@ (Jul 19, 2011)

YZMSQ said:
			
		

> Well, I think the video card support, for instance, Intel and ATI, and wireless issues are the so-called "heel".:\



I agree.  I have two eight-year-old laptops, one an IBM R51 and the other an Asus M6N.  Both work well, but the wireless driver (iwi) sometimes causes kernel panics and logging out of Xorg while using the radeon driver almost always freezes the systems.  I asked about the status of the radeon driver on IRC and a developer told me that the driver was in a sad state with no maintainer.  I'm curious why this is.  Are these drivers difficult to develop compared to other OS components?  Maybe it's the closed nature of the hardware manufacturers?  All the BSDs and GNU/Linux use Xorg as a basis for a GUI, but it seems to have a higher proportion of problems than other pieces of software for Unix-like operating systems.  I also wonder why there are so few implementations of X?  Think of the number of window managers.  I'm guessing the answer is that it's much more effort to develop an X implementation than a window manager.

If I had to add another, less-serious "Achilles heel" it would be ACPI support.  It would be awesome to reliably suspend/resume a laptop.  As far as I know, this isn't going to improve any time soon.


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## adamk (Jul 19, 2011)

mingrone said:
			
		

> I agree.  I have two eight-year-old laptops, one an IBM R51 and the other an Asus M6N.  Both work well, but the wireless driver (iwi) sometimes causes kernel panics and logging out of Xorg while using the radeon driver almost always freezes the systems.  I asked about the status of the radeon driver on IRC and a developer told me that the driver was in a sad state with no maintainer.  I'm curious why this is.  Are these drivers difficult to develop compared to other OS components?  Maybe it's the closed nature of the hardware manufacturers?  All the BSDs and GNU/Linux use Xorg as a basis for a GUI, but it seems to have a higher proportion of problems than other pieces of software for Unix-like operating systems.



I'm probably the one that told you that the radeon driver on FreeBSD is in a sad state.  I am not, however, a FreeBSD developer.

Nearly all the Xorg developers work exclusively on Linux. They made a decision recently to merge more of the code into the kernel DRM drivers. This was an unfortunate but sensible decision. Modern video cards no longer have a separate 2D unit, and all 2D rendering is done via the 3D engine. To make effective use of the 3D engine, and enable all the features, a video driver requires (among other things) a memory manager. This requires moving important functionality into the kernel but, of course, makes it harder to port that functionality to other operating systems, such as FreeBSD.

As for the closed nature of the hardware manufacturers... That doesn't really apply to radeons. While certainly not all possible documentation has been made available, there quite a few helpful specifications that they've released to the public, as long as large, usable chunks of code. All it takes is someone with the skills and desire to port the functionality to FreeBSD. This is being done for the intel driver, but no one has begun this work for the radeon driver.

Adam


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## jrm@ (Jul 19, 2011)

adamk said:
			
		

> I'm probably the one that told you that the radeon driver on FreeBSD is in a sad state.  I am not, however, a FreeBSD developer.



OK.  Thanks.

I've been following as much as I can of Konstantin Belousov's work on the Intel video drivers and like many other FreeBSD users, am looking forward to the results.


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## YZMSQ (Jul 20, 2011)

adamk said:
			
		

> I'm probably the one that told you that the radeon driver on FreeBSD is in a sad state.  I am not, however, a FreeBSD developer.
> 
> Nearly all the Xorg developers work exclusively on Linux. They made a decision recently to merge more of the code into the kernel DRM drivers. This was an unfortunate but sensible decision. Modern video cards no longer have a separate 2D unit, and all 2D rendering is done via the 3D engine. To make effective use of the 3D engine, and enable all the features, a video driver requires (among other things) a memory manager. This requires moving important functionality into the kernel but, of course, makes it harder to port that functionality to other operating systems, such as FreeBSD.
> 
> ...


So, seems Nvidia card is the only one we could worry less about on FreeBSD currently. I wonder how the Nvidia guys deal with so-called "memory manager" required by "3D engine". I think they won't try something like "kernel DRM" for license reason. :r


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## wblock@ (Jul 20, 2011)

YZMSQ said:
			
		

> So, seems Nvidia card is the only one we could worry less about on FreeBSD currently. I wonder how the Nvidia guys deal with so-called "memory manager" required by "3D engine". I think they won't try something like "kernel DRM" for license reason. :r



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode-setting
This is from 2008, but interesting.

If you want something supported now, there are Radeon 4000-series cards and notebooks with Radeon 4350.


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## YZMSQ (Jul 20, 2011)

wblock said:
			
		

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode-setting
> This is from 2008, but interesting.
> 
> If you want something supported now, there are Radeon 4000-series cards and notebooks with Radeon 4350.


Thank you, it's interesting.


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## YZMSQ (Jul 20, 2011)

wblock said:
			
		

> If you want something supported now, there are Radeon 4000-series cards and notebooks with Radeon 4350.


Well, however, the manpage of radeon in my box shows that the driver is able to serve more than 4000-series:


```
R600        Radeon HD 2900
       RV610/RV630 Radeon HD 2400/2600
       RV620/RV635 Radeon HD 3450/3470
       RV670       Radeon HD 3850/3870
       RS780       Radeon HD 3100/3200/3300
       RS880       Radeon HD 4100/4200/4290
       RV710       Radeon HD 4350/4550
       RV730       Radeon HD 4650/4670
       RV770       Radeon HD 4850/4870
       CEDAR       Radeon HD 5450
       REDWOOD     Radeon HD 5550/5570/5670
       JUNIPER     Radeon HD 5750/5770
       CYPRESS     Radeon HD 5850/5870
       HEMLOCK     Radeon HD 5970
       PALM        Radeon HD 6310/6250
       BARTS       Radeon HD 6850/6870
       TURKS       Radeon HD 6570/6670
       CAICOS      Radeon HD 6450
```

Is it true on FreeBSD or it's just yet another linux-specific stuff?


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## adamk (Jul 20, 2011)

It can drive HD6xxx GPUs only if KMS is available.  And, yes, the nvidia drivers have a memory manager inside their kernel module.

And, finally, nvidia is not necessarily the safe choice.  If the laptop has Optimus, and no BIOS option to disable the on-board intel, you are out of luck using the nvidia GPU.

Adam


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## YZMSQ (Jul 20, 2011)

adamk said:
			
		

> It can drive HD6xxx GPUs only if KMS is available.  And, yes, the nvidia drivers have a memory manager inside their kernel module.
> 
> And, finally, nvidia is not necessarily the safe choice.  If the laptop has Optimus, and no BIOS option to disable the on-board intel, you are out of luck using the nvidia GPU.
> 
> Adam


Thank you. No matter how, seems Nvidia card is a better choice than ATI and Intel currently. We've to wait till KMS is done on FreeBSD to improve the performance of ATI card on FreeBSD. I have an ATI card now.


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