Hi,

I'm using Debian Sarge atm. I've used it for about a year. I'm happy with it, I used Slackware before it but the advantage of apt in Debian really is great. Not to talk about the debian menu.
I find FreeBSD a very interesting OS as well, and would like to try it out. I think I should just download it and try. But because I have no spare computers or partitions on this computer I wanna ask some questions first.

My Debian takes about a minute to startup, I'm starting almost no services and use openbox, a light windowmanager. I didn't do kernel recompile, and I can probably improve debian's boot time by messing around in the boot scripts.
Is FreeBSD known to start up fast, without tweaking to much?

And is FreeBSD known to run fast? like being able to run on a p1 166mhz 64mb ram...

I know these are very relative questions! And I should just try it myself. But I'd like to be convinced before trying it

Another question. Is there something like the automatic debian menu in FreeBSD?

grtz
guni

yes, yes and yes. Especially on older hardware I have found almost no comparison. I have been using FreeBSD for about a year now and love it. It's just like anything else though, your results may vary. I have heard that OpenBSD may be even faster but I havent tried it just yet.

I suggest you download it and give it a try, if you can get another system (you can pick em up cheap) I run a FreeBSD box on a Pentium Pro 200, runs great.

Yes, FreeBSD is fast. Not as fast as some linux distro's *could* be, though. I like this OS. It gves me some kind of feling of simplicity (try recompiling FreeBSD's kernel, and you'll know). Contrary to linux, where everybody can do what they want FreeBSD's development is centralized (which is a Good Thing IMAO). All that said FreeBSD has a good Source/Binary package management too and is compatible with linux binaries (through linux binary compatibility layer). There is even (easyer to install than Linux IMO) Nvidia's graphics driver, if that is a concern to you. But FreeBSD is more of a server OS, and less suitable for desktop usage than Linux. It ,arguably, has better security.

All in all, try it and you will like it.

I just got into X in my new freebsd install. It took a long while because I chose a very slow server during install, it was going at 20kb/s .

I gotta qdmit thqt freebsd reqlly boots fast and the installer is very nice too.

Now I just gotta find how to configure this.
Is there a package like debians menu, which takes care of automaticly updating menus in all windowmanagers after installing new packages ?

grtz

I think that a default installation of FreeBSD runs faster on older hardware than any flavor of Linux that I have ever used.

BSD uses its package and ports collection for software, as simple as
That will get firefox from the package collection and install it taking care of all dependencies.

That will install a package if you already downloaded it. Of course you can also compile from source.

BSD doesn't suffer from the stalling problem that all Linux distros that I have ever tried have. If you are going to run X with a windows mgr. you may want a little more than 64MB RAM if you can get it.

BSD makes a fine desktop. There might not be quite as much software available for it as for Linux but I don't find it lacking. It has sound support for old all in one Mother Boards, wi-fi support, its rock stable. Firefox is the only app that the BSD port is a little buggy that I have found. It's all there, Browsers, Word processors, Email clients, multimedia, developement ect.

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...ook/index.html
http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/man.cgi

i am also considering trying out PC-BSD , but i am still a little reluctant so if you tried it out you could post back your experience with it

On my system only Slack boots faster than FreeBSD 5.4. I like the ports system and the fact that there is a large number of packages available to install. I'm mainly using FreeBSD as a desktop OS, so that I get used to it before deploying it on a few servers.

As far as I know, it has not. FreeBSD does not provide many tools to help a desktop user. You could try PC-BSD and see if you like it (in case you want an easy (l)user-friendly desktop).

PS.:
I am using ArchLinux/FreeBSD and Fluxbox with no such thing as debian menu quite happily.

Yea the menu isn't that important. I found a little package wmconfig to generate menus (it's not that good). I wouldn't try pcbsd, I want the real thing .
I think FreeBSD is really clean. It boots fast in about 20 seconds. Debian boots in about 1 minute here.I can imagine debian can be optimized to boot faster, but I already did some "optimizing" only to get that 1 minute. See my page if you want to know what I did: http://users.skynet.be/six/gpure/tech/linux/debian.html

Now I'm going to read some more about the portssystem or packagesystem in freebsd. I have installed some packages but pkg_add -r doesn't seem to be able to find some packages like openbox. I'll probably have to do something like apt-get update in debian? I tought that was cvsup but it didn't help me much, it just kept running for hours.

It looks like I have to add the version number behind the package name in many cases. Is there no way to do without?

grtz

the freebsd handbook explains packages and ports quite well

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...lications.html

Yea, now I learned how to use that. I have to say it takes a longer time to update software then in Debian. Of course it's not fair to compare them like that, but apt-get update apt-get upgrade is way faster then cvsup and portupgrade. A big difference is that portupgrade compiles the software while apt-get upgrade just takes care of precompiled packages. I'm not used to compiling everything.

I'm running this now on an amd xp1700+ and 256mb ram. I guess I won't install freebsd on my p1 166mhz because it would probably take days to compile.
I'm still impressed with freebsd's clean layout, good documentation, nice install and performance. I also got my sound working in no time, it's really simple.
Only the ports system doesn't look that good. There are all those different utilities like cvsup, portupgrade, pkg_add, portsdb,pkgdb. It looks quite a chaos to me. I gotta learn it a bit better before my critics are worth anything tho

grtz
guni

You should look into the man page for portupgrade if you don't want to wait for everything to build locally. There's a flag to tell it to use packages (prebuilt binaries) whenever possible.

The whole thing can seem a little daunting at first, but it's really not all that bad. I'll admit that it's not (and never will be in it's current setup) as simple as apt though.

To the people that suggest that FreeBSD isn't a good desktop ... get a clue. There are ~10,000 ports available. Chances are, if you have it on your Linux "desktop" distro, FreeBSD has it too.

One of the things that I like about *BSD for older boxes is that you can set it up on your big CPU machine, build for your older (or other architecture) machines, export src/ obj/ and ports/ via NFS to the other boxes and just do the "make installworld" part of updating.

portupgrade -P i think for binary updates, but i prefer compiling from source because the ports are updated quicker.