Posted on Fri 10/24/08 in FreeBSD
I have played with the idea for a long time: installing FreeBSD on a computer. There was no specific reason other than sheer interest. I like playing around with operating systems and a BSD was something I had never accomplished before. Oh yes, I had tried, but never got satisfactionary results.
My laptop (or flex-computer, since I reinstall it every month or so to test something new) was the first to succumb. I had to wait for FreeBSD 7 to get support for my hda sound chip and my wifi. Two weeks ago the time had come and my beloved openSUSE install had to go. Since it was my laptop, meant for browsing, chatting and idling on the couch with me, I went with PC-BSD, a user friendly BSD, based on FreeBSD 7, with a graphical installer. All went well and soon I was browsing away happily on my BSD laptop!
It wasn’t all good. My browser of choice, Opera refused to work with Flash, even after installing the opera-linuxplugins port. I settled for Firefox 3 using swfdec for my youtube needs. For the rest my laptop and its fresh install work perfectly! I even made a screenshot for your entertainment :-)
After this great success, up was my home server. It serves as a file server, media server (for streaming to my PS3), web dev environment (though I’m not that active anymore), database server, etc. and had been running on Gentoo Linux for over two years. With a spare disk to test on, I went ahead and installed FreeBSD 7.0 amd64 on it. Installation was a breeze and almost everything was working perfectly within a short time. Samba felt snappier than before, but perhaps I just misconfigured my old samba install on gentoo, who knows.
Oh yes, I said almost everything. Problem childs were SabNZBd+ and BTG, my usenet and torrent daemons. I’m on the verge of solving the problems and will make a new post as I progress. Hopefully someone will one day have use for my sollutions.
Jurz,
Congratz with your new site. Looks really cool. Obviously I’ll now need one as well. hehehe
— RockSteady · Oct 25, 10:02 PM · #
Nice layout, Jur…
In your recent IM’s you kept me informed on your progress in BSD-land.
When I feel the urge to convert my old server, running Gentoo, to run Freebsd, I’ll probably be nagging you alot :P
Hi,
Your desktop’s screenshot is great!!!
What did you use for this? (KDE skin & wallpaper)
Thx!
— HaJi · Jul 3, 06:19 PM · #
