sounds like a plan. You need to get an account here. https://bitbucket.org/ make it much easier to communicate and handle the freebsd build.

That is my reaction to OpenBSD. Yesterday I tried to install it as a second system in a dual-boot setup with Slackware. After a slight mishap that was repairable, I decided, what the hell, and used the entire hard-drive. If I can figure out everything I need to, I shall be finished with Linux. I hope so, because the system is amazing.

I am either very lucky or OpenBSD has greatly increased hardware support recently. My computer is only a year old and has an Nvidia Gforce card. OpenBSD works perfectly on it. If support is hit-and-miss, I can at least be happy.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hey, great! Welcome to the BSD refuge! I transitioned from curious to convinced sometime in June of this year and posted a short diary of my experience.

I still say WOW at each boot! FWIW, I was able to successfully install my FreeBSD dual boot with Slackware64-14.1. I did find the BSD partition tools a little confusing but was able to work through it without damaging my pre-existing Slackware install. I kept good notes, but from memory it seems that the key was to free the desired space and create the partition from that with the Guided option - as opposed to trying to install to an existing partition. Slackware/Lilo manages the MBR of the drive and a simple chain boot stanza to the BSD partition starts it up!

If you want to try for a dual boot again I'll get my notes to you or otherwise help any that I can!

This machine is AMD Phenom II X2 and Nvidia GEForce 1650SE and is running the 304.xxx driver without any problems (installed from ports).

I love the prots system and have used it to install all my own packages so far. A few of the builds were substantial (3~4 hours) but I build everything myself under Slackware so no big surprises.

In the past couple of weeks I have transitioned my FreeBSD machine into my normal workflow so that I am assured to spend time using it at least every day or two - no longer just a learning machine!

I am not saying goodbye to Slackware just yet, but the major motivation for getting online with FreeBSD was to have a refuge from systemd in particular, should that be necessary. So Slackware is still my main ticket, but if Pat cannot find a way forward without systemd, I'll already be at speed on FreeBSD and not miss many steps.

I am glad to have your company here in the Unix hinter-lands!

And, just... WOW!

Another Slackware/BSD user
Welcome into the club

I am not sure if Open and FreeBSD use the same installer, but the only real damage I did was to mistakingly flag either the Slackware or the boot partition as BSD. I probably could have fixed the damage with my Slackware, Parted Magic or Knoppix disc, but I felt unusually daring and decided to use the easier option of the entire hard-drive.

Like I mentioned earlier, assuming I can figure out how to properly edit fstab, if I can use Ibus without a package I have become accustomed to using (it is not available in the package repository) I would not want to dual-boot. OpenBSD works too damn well.

Do not get too excited. I may not be cut out for it and retreat back to Slackware. (Which is a great fallback option to have.)

I would be interested to know which driver is in use? If you can post a grep of dmesg just to show that? e.g.

Also X.org logs would help:
May show what we want to see, may not...

I am guessing it's using the vesa driver, but that's a complete guess.

You could grep for "vesa" to see if it's being loaded?

This driver is for FreeBSD only. OpenBSD's position on Nvidia (and blobs in general) is well known:

http://www.openbsd.org/amd64.html
No, totally different OS/projects.

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Must be using whichever open source driver OpenBSD uses. Debian and, I assume, Slackware used the neuveau driver.
Empty.

No nouveau in OpenBSD.
Try a grep for "vesa", or just post the whole log (in code tags).

Opening the file shows it is not empty. It looks like I am using the vesa driver.

Thanks, I was not aware that the driver was FreeBSD only. I run almost exclusively on reclaimed and salvaged hardware, and it currently includes a LOT of machines with the 1650XX chips, so I have more or less accepted the Nvidia driver on my Slackware installs and extended that to my FreeBSD.

I also expected there was more commonality between the BSDs on things like the installer. This incorrect expectation probably tems from things like the ports system being somewhat common among them.

I am still learning the BSD landscape! Thanks!

Yes it's the vesa driver. It's actually quite useable, but there is no hardware acceleration. Is it a laptop or desktop? If you can swap the graphics card out for an AMD Radeon you will get hardware acceleration and DRI.
With nvidia hardware FreeBSD is probably the pragmatic choice.

I also run old and salvaged hardware - not really interested in running the latest hardware. My main system has evolved continuously by having parts replaced over a period of about 20 years... the mouse is currently the longest lived part, it's a 15 year old MS optical mouse.
FreeBSD and NetBSD are the first two BSD operating systems to come from 386BSD. The evolution however is much more complex and all systems derive from 4.4BSD as well.

NetBSD was forked very early on when Theo (one of the NetBSD founders) was ejected from the project apparently due to differences. He went on to start OpenBSD. DragonFly BSD is a fork of FreeBSD. Those are the main four, the others you hear about mainly just being derivatives - usually of FreeBSD.

Despite their common origins, the main four are very different. Code is still shared if it's deemed good enough, but all kernels a lot of other software in the base systems different. Thus a driver for OpenBSD has to be ported to FreeBSD as it's not binary compatible.

OpenBSD's ports system is based on FreeBSD's - well an earlier iteration - but has evolved differently, hence the similarity. NetBSD's pkgsrc was also originally based on FreeBSD ports system - though I've no experience of NetBSD as it lacks the athn driver (and I depend on wifi). athn will apparently be in the next release at which point I plan to install.

Still learning here also.

Laptop. Hardware acceleration? Have never needed it yet.