Installed FreeBSD 4.9 a few days ago on an old machine (Pentium 150, so too old to support apm/acpi) that was previously running Debian. Liking it so far, but there's one thing that's really bugging me.

When I shut the computer down (using 'shutdown -h now' or similar), the hard drive heads don't 'park'. In Debian, there was this reassuring 'thunk' at the end of the shutdown procedure as the heads moved to their off position (I'm not sure what actually happens in there) and the drive span down before I turned off the power, but in FreeBSD the drive just keeps on spinning until I switch it off. I know this sounds like an insignificant issue, but it's really annoying. I can't find anything in the handbook or man pages relating to this, so is it just how things are supposed to be, or is there some other way to influence the drive's behaviour?

Hey, I'm a Debian / FreeBSD user too (since a few days) and I've noticed the same difference: funny .

I trust both systems for shutting down my system properly, but I'm definitely not an expert, and can't tell you anything about it. But I too would like to know what that 'thunk' is .

I just found out "pkg_add -r" is about the equivalent of apt-get. I just started missing apt-get . BSD uses a lot less memory too, have you noticed that?

Greetings!

Corien

I noticed that Gentoo surprised me that way as well. In CLI, it was taking ~13mb to be alive.

I read somewhere that Linux uses any available memory as a cache for disk blocks, which is why the output of 'free' always makes it seem like all the RAM is being used even when you're not doing anything. Not sure whether FreeBSD also does this - maybe a reason for the big difference in memory usage?

I too am hoping that the BSD ports system and package utilities are all they're reputed to be!

FreeBSD (at least in 5.x) has very dynamic memory allocation that intelligently uses "free" memory for caching. Some wizard at Juniper explained it to me once and I forgot most of it

I'm constantly cracked up by Linux users that rave about how great apt-get and emerge are... then they find out that both are just poor copies of FreeBSD's* Ports, which has been around for a whole lot longer.

*NetBSD and OpenBSD use the Ports system as well, but they have less Ported software available than FreeBSD does.

Oh by the way, are you sure it's the hard drives that were shutting down, or was it the case fans? I know the case fans definitely do stay on until you physically turn the power off, but I never noticed the HDDs continuing to spin. In any case, as long as it doesn't say "/ was not unmounted cleanly" when it boots up the next time you're OK.

About apt-get and the ports: so far I have experienced apt-get works better than the ports: apt-get just works. About the ports: I installed yahoo messenger: didn't work (missing library?), installed amsn, didn't work (some strange error about tcl).

It's definitely the drive. I'm sure it's not doing any harm (as you say, the OS is halting itself correctly) - it just feels a bit wrong to me, turning off the computer while the drive is still going.

Majority of the time that is related to someone not using cvsup to update their ports tree.
One of the first things you should do after installing. If you rely on the ports tree from the initial installation you will find you are going to have some issues.

are you using the -P flag to 'powerdown' the computer? Works fine for me.

Running it on very old hardware which doesn't support auto powerdown. Even with that flag, same thing happens.

I've had plenty of apt-get packages not work on Mac OS X with fink (I know that's different from doing the same in Debian, but just to prove a point). It's not the system that's flawed, it's the package maintainer.

As someone already said, cvsup your ports tree before trying to build anything, or alternatively just install the package if available (.tgz format).

It doesn't really matter if it is the package maintainer or not: if you have a good package manager and bad package maintainers the packaging still works bad... I think I'll have to get used to installing with trouble if I use FreeBSD .

What is it that makes you like FreeBSD?

You still didn't say whether you updated everything before you tried installing Yahoo... I have great things to say about ports. It installs all dependencies and rarely do I encounter an error with an installation. Just last night I upgraded 40 something ports on my home server. I knew they were out of date so I updated my ports and then portupgrade -a (it doesn't run a gui so I don't worry about using -a ) and walked away. Php had me check off a few things in the middle of it, but other than that I didn't do a anything but wait for it to finish.

I installed KDE3.2 on this machine (although my wireless setup ended up not really working =\ ) and all I had to do was type make install clean in kde3.2 and let it rip. Took a while. It can't get much easier than that.

But when I first started messing with FreeBSD I ran into issues with installing apps from ports until I realised how important it is to keep your ports tree up to date. There is always that occassional bug, or glitch.

Okay, I didn't know that, and I didn't get that your first post. The manual didn't say that .

I'm using 5.2.1, on FreeBSD's site I found a serious warning about installing 5.2.1 (it would be unstable and only advicable for experienced users). I just installed my FreeBSD with an iso I downloaded last week. Have the ports already changed that much???

Well, okay, I'll just try it out...

They don't make a new ISO every time the ports change =)

The ports you are using are from the release date of the ISO, which could be last November or something like that.