PC-BSD is very slick with a well-designed UI. I liked it when I gave it a try.

It also comes with the ability to partition with ZFS not just UFS.

... and beadm

I've moved back to FreeBSD again and am very happy with it. I *really* like both FreeBSD and OpenBSD. It is a real pleasure to run FreeBSD 9.1 with Gnome 2.32.

I've only ran into one issue running Free/PC-BSD and that is my HP Presario V6305NR laptop will outright refuse to boot anything BSD related. I think it's a hardware issue, but I'm staking a bet that it's possibly a system incompatibility.

Strange, I didn't get any problem with FreeBSD9.1, as in Virtualbox as in hard, but it is true that I installed it in my PC-desktop, not in my laptop.

The only problem I have is to boot it from Grub2 of my Fedora17, I have to boot directly on the HD by the Boot Loader of the BSD, after changing the HD order in the BIOS.

If it can help you, after the base installation, before booting, you have to :

- add packages for xorg,

- eventually add packages for bash, vim (create a /.vimrc and copy in it the /usr/local/share/vim/vim73/vimrc_example.vim file),

If you use KDE, add KDE4 packages, and to boot do not forget to add And add this, without mistake(s), be careful : in etc/rc.conf file.

Yes, very easy to install NVidia driver, no problem.

About Slackware, it is a BSD's cousin, I love this distro, very easy to use, I use the multilibs version, the first time it is a bit hard to add the 32 packages and to configure all, but once it is done, the updates are very easy, all is very stable, superb.

Agreed. Slackware is wonderful. It is my favourite distro.

I agree as well. Of all the Linux distros I've tried, Slackware is my favorite. I actually find it the easiest distro to understand.

If you don't mind me asking, what prompted your switch from OpenBSD to FreeBSD? I had been running OpenBSD on my laptop as well before switching to FreeBSD for better performance among other things.

I get easily bored with OSs and I like to switch things up a lot. At the moment I am back with OpenBSD 5.3 again. I've used FreeBSD for awhile, I started using FreeBSD back at 5.x. I like how OpenBSD is simple, secure, and bullet proof. FreeBSD has an exceptional community, excellent documentation, and lots of packages, ports to choose from. FreeBSD is also an excellent BSD. I will likely run FreeBSD 9.1 in a VM again on my Slackware partition. I'm currently dual booting Slackware-current and OpenBSD 5.3 on this box. OpenBSD lends itself very easily to dual booting with Slackware using lilo.

A problem that I got with Fedora that is my first OS (for the time), using Grub2 : impossible to boot FreBSD from Grub2, and yet I have tried f... many ways, I have to modify BIOS HD priorities and boot directly from the HD where is installed FreeBSD.

I am sure that if I used Slackware as my first OS, Lilo should be able to boot FreeBSD.

You can more easily dual boot earlier versions of FreeBSD (8.x) with Slackware and lilo. I used to have a nice Slackware/FreeBSD(8.x) dual boot system. The 9.x branch of FreeBSD is more difficult to dual boot with other OSs. There are some ways to do this using grub on Slackware although I have not tried it myself.

Grub2 should pick up Free/PC-BSD without a problem.

Yes, it should be, but it does not, I think it is a specific problem to Fedora 17.

Like Slackware it mounts the partition (with kernel-modules), so i can read in the partition from Dolphin, but I cannot launch from Grub, I tried many and many ways.

Anyway, the HD where is installed FreeBSD is dead, so I have to re-install on a new HD, and I have now Fedora18, I'll see later on.

LILO also might work well as a bootloader for it.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/...ot-blocks.html