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.
