First impressions of DesktopBSD from an OS *****

[Scheater5]

Well, I've written one of these on Fedora 6, OpenSuSE and Sabayon and all of those were after I had become acquainted with the system. But now I've installed DesktopBSD, and I decided to write about my impression from very early in my time with the OS, and hopefully share with you guys as some of my issues are resolved.
Well, just getting BSD installed was a challenge. I tried FreeBSD a year or so ago and couldn't get a working system going. But I'm quite a bit more experienced in unix-like systems now, and while FreeBSD seemed not worth the effort when I have a working Ubuntu system, PC-BSD seemed worth looking into.
Well, that failed. I still don't know what that install had against my laptop, but the best I can tell is the entire system locked up when it tried to load X. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=490089

So, I downloaded and installed DesktopBSD. This time, at least I got a working desktop. Unfortunatly, it's not all that useful. No open office. Didn't recognize my ALPS touchpad. Didn't recognize my monitor resolution. Didn't recognize my keyboard properly (the only problem resolved thus far). But most importantly, didn't recognize my wireless card.
And ports...wow...and I thought portage on Gentoo (well, Sabayon) was annoying. At least when you went through the time consuming process of compiling software it worked. And at least portage handled dependencies.
I tried installing the firmware for my wireless card - which I found a bit odd, but every forum I searched said that's what other people had done. Well, first I fired up the GUI for software management, and after having to "ignore" a dependency, it reported sucessful install. But then I fired up a terminal to load the driver as per instructions found on several forums

kldload if_iwi

which failed. Tried installing the firmware via command line, and that wouldn't even sucessfully install - or get started installing for that matter, spitting out some error message about X. I couldn't see how X had anything to do with package instalation - especially when I got the same error message from a terminal (as in, not terminal emulator).
So I thought it might be that I misunderstood how to install the driver, so I tried to install open office, and that hung on a dependency. On a fresh install, OPEN OFFICE won't install because of unresolvable dependencies?? Wow.

[Bachstelze]

BSD is not for you. Why bother ?

[kamaboko]

I don't get it. Isn't Linux suppose to be the easiest OS in the world to install?

[.aku]

I don't get it. Isn't Linux suppose to be the easiest OS in the world to install?

BSD is not Linux..

//aku

[Scheater5]

BSD is not for you. Why bother ?

Well, that may or may not be true. But this isn't one of those classic "these are the reasons I hate *insert OS here* and you should do things like *my favorite OS* " posts. I don't know if BSD is for me or not, but I try and make it a policy to familiarize myself with an OS before I decide wether or not I like it. Thus the phrase "first impression" in my topic. I'm going to get to know BSD before I decide what to do with that partition (as in leave DesktopBSD or lose it).

BTW, Hymntolife, isn't that a Nightwish quote in your sig? Very nice.

[darkog]

Different *nix's are suited for different things. The two main BSD's, FreeBSD and OpenBSD, are IMO geared more for network devices, routers, servers, e.t.c. and not so much as desktops (now this is debatable until we all go blue in the face)

I am not saying that FreeBSD or any of the other BSD's can't be used as a desktop -- they can. But considering that the number of developers working on them is peanuts compared to the sheer number working on Ubuntu, SUSE or Fedora -- you might find that all the new & nifty bells and whistles, especially media related stuff (aka DVD movies making e.t.c., the newest and greatest features of Gnome ), may not be readily available on a BSD. Now, mind you, I have never used DesktopBSD or PC-BSD, but I can't imagine they have a very large developer base.

So I am not that surprised that some of your funky hardware (touchpad) didn't work out of the box so to speak. Having said that. The most secure and solid internet facing device you can have on this planet (short of military grade stuff) is a properly configured and secured OpenBSD box. It's well worth learning it.

all the best.

[theonlyrealperson]

Just as an aside, I never got the iwi-firmware-kmod to work in DesktopBSD 1.6 RC-2. It wouldn't compile, and I wasn't the only one with the problem. It was never acknowledged, and I have no idea if it is/was going to be addressed.

In vanilla FreeBSD 6.2, it works well, with only a memory allocation issue.

[weblordpepe]

The next Ubuntu is supposed to be able to get certain wifi firmwares automatically for ya. Should be cool! It was a right mess getting my Broadcom chipset working and it still doesnt do WPA

[wilberfan]

I tried DesktopBSD--twice--in the past week (once on my 64-bit dual-core AMD, once on my 32-bit Pentium 4 DELL) and found that neither would properly recognize my respective video cards--and that was during the install process!

Bleah.

I guess I've been spoiled by 'buntu and OpenSuSE and Sabayon...

[amoore]

I tired PC-BSD about 2 weeks ago. It was a nice, fast, and dependable OS. The deal breaker was I could never get my Atheros wifi card to work in it. Back to Ubuntu!!!