Rolling Along, One Glitch, I’m Happy with My Decision

Most of my computers have been simple to set up with FreeBSD 6.2. The documentation is superb, especially the handbook.

One of my computers is very quirky, though, but I’m getting there. It’s the one I set up to boot without ACPI to see if that would remedy the floppy. Well, that fixed the floppy problem but it’s also caused something else to go awry: now I can’t properly power down. Before I changed to no ACPI, I could run shutdown and then press my power button and it would turn off. Now I run shutdown and pressing the power button reboots the computer. No big deal since I rarely turn it off, but I really hate turning the power off during POST (which is the first chance in the whole sequence I get to use the power button again).

I’ll see if there’s something else I can do about the floppy or find a tweak for ACPI before I decide to live with it (it’ll probably get lengthy uptimes between boots regardless) or without floppies (not exactly a priority). I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to get it sorted out. Just not tonight.

The only noticeable performance difference I can tell is GNU screen doesn’t hang when switching around between things and my audio doesn’t stutter when I have stuff compiling. That’s not much of a benchmark and it’s only anecdotal, but watching top while all that was happening leads me to believe that FreeBSD schedules much better than Linux 2.4 (and probably better than 2.6 even though I can’t address it because I remember ever installing 2.6 — just used 2.6 on live CDs).

Over all, I’m pretty happy with how smoothly everything has gone.

Done. Sort of.

FreeBSD 6.2 is now installed on every computer except my XP box (which will eventually get the same “upgrade”) and my old NT hard drive (I have thumb drives with more storage, so why bother?).

More to come later this weekend. Or Monday.

Edited About Page

My “about” page now reflects the fact I no longer have Linux installed on any partition on any hard drive or on any computer or USB thumb drive. The last remaining Linux vestiges are installation and live CDs.

Update: Settling on FreeBSD… Probably

I think I’m finally settling on a FreeBSD-based system without ports or pkgsrc, and just compile what I want to use. I find myself using the same apps and utilities so it makes more sense to me to compile what I want than to add 400 MB of makefiles, etc., I’ll barely use — aside from my own files and audio collection, 400 MB is about all I’m going to have on my system anyway (unless I keep the sources). I still might install ports to “jump start” the installation of dependencies, and there’s about a 10% chance I’ll change my mind and decide on either NetBSD or OpenBSD instead. But I’m leaning pretty firmly in one direction now.

I’ve been running mostly from my FreeBSD 6.0 installed on my laptop and also a transient spare hard drive shuttled between computers ranging from a 100 mhz Pentium to my 1300 mhz Athlon.I installed man pages and ports. From ports, I’ve added GNU screen and mp3blaster (and the dependencies needed to get them up and running). From source, I’ve compiled a few more apps.  GNU screen is mandatory for me. I won’t be installing X. I installed mp3blaster to test FreeBSD with my soundcards.

The only issue I’ve had is with an Intel i810 internal sound card where I got a message (several actually) that loading the meta snd_driver may not have succeeded. But it did, so there’s no issue. All the rest of my sound cards have worked flawlessly — load the driver, voila. I didn’t set up to load specific drivers because I’ve been shuttling around hard drives and didn’t want to have to keep changing drivers. The meta driver will be great if I make any live CDs.

I’m having the same issue I mentioned before with my USB keyboard only working in one port. I can live with that for now. I haven’t tried loading CDCEther in different USB ports yet.

Finally, I haven’t been able to mount a floppy. I get an error message that it’s not configured. I’ll try it with a non-ACPI kernel and see if that does the trick.

I’ll likely upgrade all partitions with clean installs of FreeBSD 6.2 this weekend.

OpenBSD 4.2 ISO Installation

Doh! A day after I installed 4.1 the old-fashioned way, along comes OpenBSD’s new single ISO.

New Installation ISO Files in 4.2:

Now that the install sets are included in the installXY.iso image file, the single ISO file can be downloaded for the installation process. Previously with the cdXY.iso image files, you would also need to download the install sets separately (either to a local mirror or during the installation).

Yes, All Three

Progress! Got everything set up this weekend. I initially was going to set up my computers on NetBSD. I decided, after some discussion, to install NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD on different hard drives so I can switch them between computers and get an assessment of which works best with which hardware. With one exception, all are set up with pkgsrc. The one exception is a FreeBSD install with ports.

Everything has gone very smoothly save for a couple minor issues. One was with NetBSD and ethernet over USB while using a USB keyboard. The USB keyboard only works in one port (what’s up with that?). That’s the same one ethernet wants to use (what’s up with that?!). Not a big issue (more a matter of convenience), so I’m just using a standard NIC. No idea if the mouse wants that port, too, but it doesn’t matter since I don’t have plans to install X on any partition.

The second issue is the time required for compiling source on a RAM-challenged, slow CPU machine. Nothing that time won’t cure in the short term (if the electricity stays on). Short term is relative; I know it wouldn’t take so long if it weren’t a spanking fresh install with all kinds of dependencies to meet. The long-run fix for that is using binaries or a combination of more patience and less coffee.

I’m pressed for time and the lights are flickering (storm), so I’ll post impressions of installing and setting up each this week.