Geek Style

I have always been an ATI fan since nVidia did not exist. And so far it served well on my workstations. I don’t even care that they are part of AMD now.
However, something that was annoying me for a while was ATI’s driver which seems to not as good as nVidia’s in *nix, especially for their newer and high-end cards. I am not sure why ATI does not care much about their non-windows drivers, but I am sure that they are loosing lots of faithful customers and a good market share for just the same reason.

I have very limited resources at home to test new stuff (However I am planning to make a well equipped home lab like the one scott morris has soon). But I make good use of virtual machines on my Windows XP workstation.

I use Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 (which is now free) at home because it is very light-weight and runs FreeBSD 7 very well. But at work I get the most out of VMWare Server ( free, too! ). VMWare is much bulkier and heavier, but gives you fine control over virtual machines. And officially supports FreeBSD and Solaris (my favorite ones) and has vmware-tools package for Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and Netware. However vmware-tools does not work on my fbsd7 installation (dumps core), but I don’t care because I don’t run X and use if_le driver and do fine tuning manually.

If you have limited resources, I strongly suggest Microsoft Virtual PC. Though it does not officially support non-microsoft operating systems, I have several FreeBSD installation on it without any problem. Excellent for trying out system for a limited time. But if you are planning to make serious use of your virtual FreeBSD, VMware would be your only choice as it officially supports FreeBSD (even runs 64-bit edition, but I never tried that) and runs X very well.

If you are thinking of running FreeBSD on VMWare, Ivan Voras‘ article has some very useful that would make life much easier.

The first thing I did after I finished installing Gran Paradiso Alpha 2, was checking if it passes Web Standard’s ACID2 test, and unbelievably it did! And I was amazed to see it really passed the test!
The release notes says the browser is now completely standards compliance. Great!
There are other improvements that affect Mac version that I haven’t tested yet.

I finally found some spare time to try the PC-BSD 1.3 on a virtual machine. Despite the fact that I always use Windows and OSX as my Desktop OS of choice, I am always curious to evaluate open-source desktop environment, especially those who has something BSD related on underlying layers.
It did not last longer than a couple of hours on my harddisk before getting removed. But I had very good experience during this very short time.

First of all, if you are looking for 3D effects (Beryl and xgl) stuff, just go away and use Fedora or OpenSUSE. PC-BSD is not loaded with such stuff. Its only a functional and usable desktop, loaded with all necessary stuff. If you feel you need more packages than the pre-installed ones, feel free to take a look at PBIDIR for a pre-compiled package of most major open-source softwares.

Only a few things I noticed during the installation and using PC-BSD:

- Graphical installer is easy and powerful
- System configures a simple firewall which is enough for desktop use.
- There is a automatic online update mechanism in place. Excellent for novice users.
- It asks if you are installing a Server or Desktop during installation. So you can use it as server if you are interested.
- Window Manager is KDE 3.5.5 which looks good and easy to use as desktop
- All these stuff are running on FreeBSD 6.1
- HAL works very good. I tried a few removable stuff like external DVD-RW and USB thumb drivers, and it was as easy as just plugging in the hardware.
- It looks for SMP hardware, so no kernel re-compile is needed.

Conclusion: If you are looking for a hassle-free deskop OS that works on your old hardware, and you don’t want blazing 3D effects, PCBSD is a very good choice for you.

If you are still using FreeBSD 4.x somewhere, you should really consider upgrading to latest version as the project does not support 4.x anymore.
I would suggest upgrading to 6.x for production use or 7.x (-CURRNET) for your development use. However I consider -CURRENT mature enought to use for production in our environment.

If you like the way FreeBSD 4.x worked, I would also suggest you trying DragonFlyBSD. They just announced releasing 1.8 that offers quite a few major improvments.