Thoughts on BSD

Gullible Jones · 2008-11-18 04:32:14

This is one area I'll disagree with you guys... I like the ports system, but I'm finding that I strongly dislike the package management system. AFAICT it doesn't do any handling of dependencies on uninstall, and FreeBSD likes to make things depend on everything they could ever theoretically want; which means that one screw up can leave a huge number of rubbish packages stuck on your system.

I guess I'm kind of of a different mindset regarding package management. Generally I like things simple and elegant and all, but in package managers IMHO functionality trumps all else, because a package manager lacking a few functions can make a system extremely painful to deal with.

smakked · 2008-11-18 04:44:27

Im Currently messing with FreeBSD and its not bad but i agree with you on the slowness of opening applications. Package Management seems ok and pretty speedy, but i haven't really had a chance to mess with it fully.

lucke · 2008-11-18 08:16:13

I could be using FreeBSD if it had pacman ;-)

Redroar · 2008-11-18 15:01:12

lucke: Please port pacman to FreeBSD and maintain a repo. I bet it would significantly increase the number of BSD users, and I've heard a number Arch users saying that they'd switch or consider switching if it had a good package manager (pacman!)

Ahhh, pipe dreams.

XFire · 2008-11-18 15:23:23

Nothing compares to pacman.

string · 2008-11-18 18:55:26

Porting pacman to FreeBSD would significantly increase the number of BSD users? My my aren't we cocky. FreeBSD (at the very least) has perfectly fine package management utilities IMNSHO.

Redroar · 2008-11-18 23:13:45

Perhaps we have differing opinions on significant. Significant to me is in the range of a 5% increase, which I think is quite possible if there is a dependency-resolving-non-port-tree-controlled-binary-package-manager-that-is-very-fast-and-very-easy-to-build-packages-for.

I hate writing ports with a passion. Gimme a good ol' PKGBUILD.

cardinals_fan · 2008-11-19 00:58:28

I much prefer Pkgsrc to Ports.

Ranguvar · 2008-11-19 01:48:18

I see a few people recommending NetBSD and OpenBSD. Forgetting about the former's great mutli-arch support and the latter's security advantages, what do they offer as compared to FreeBSD? I'd like to try *BSD, and I'm looking for one similar in philosophy to Arch. In other words, minimalism and configurability. How do NetBSD and OpenBSD compare in that regard? Also, do either of those offer a rolling release like FreeBSD Current? I'm so sick of first Winblows and then Ubuntu, where I'd usually reinstall after every major release due to problems, that I don't think I can live without a rolling release. I'd much rather deal with troubles with a specific package upgrading. Then I know who to holler at, and about what, instead of a bunch of broken things at once and no clue where to look to find out what specifically. Plus, I've heard *BSD upgrade horror stories....

cardinals_fan · 2008-11-19 01:53:43

Ranguvar wrote:

I see a few people recommending NetBSD and OpenBSD. Forgetting about the former's great mutli-arch support and the latter's security advantages, what do they offer as compared to FreeBSD? I'd like to try *BSD, and I'm looking for one similar in philosophy to Arch. In other words, minimalism and configurability. How do NetBSD and OpenBSD compare in that regard? Also, do either of those offer a rolling release like FreeBSD Current? I'm so sick of first Winblows and then Ubuntu, where I'd usually reinstall after every major release due to problems, that I don't think I can live without a rolling release. I'd much rather deal with troubles with a specific package upgrading. Then I know who to holler at, and about what, instead of a bunch of broken things at once and no clue where to look to find out what specifically. Plus, I've heard *BSD upgrade horror stories....

NetBSD is extremely clear and controllable. In order to be portable, the NetBSD devs have created a clean and audited system. NetBSD offers a SNAPSHOT rolling release, but it is a development version and is often broken to some extent. NetBSD is source-based (mostly...) with an emphasis on stability. NetBSD has a very similar philosophy to Arch; here is a comparison from the Arch wiki:

Arch vs NetBSD
NetBSD is a free, secure, and highly portable UNIX-like open-source operating system available for over 50 platforms, from 64-bit Opteron machines and desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices. Its clean design and advanced features make it excellent in both production and research environments, and it is user-supported with complete source. Many applications are easily available through pkgsrc, the NetBSD Packages Collection. Arch may not operate on the vast number of devices NetBSD operates on, but for an i686 system it may offer more apps. Also, the default installation method in pkgsrc is to pull and compile sources whereas Arch offers binary packages. Arch does share many similarities with NetBSD; both use /etc/rc.conf as the main conf file, they are very minimalist and lightweight, they both offer ports systems as well as binaries and both have active, no-nonsense devs and communities. Arch also borrows from *BSD for its init system concepts.

It isn't BSD, but you might like SliTaz Cooking. It's a bit new, but still offers a reasonably stable rolling release system. I think SliTaz will be great quite soon.

Ranguvar · 2008-11-19 02:14:10

Clear and controllable, I like. Only a testing rolling release, not so much Thanks, though. I will probably try it at least a little. Any specific examples of differences between NetBSD and FreeBSD in terms of configuration or otherwise?

And thanks for the SliTaz tip. I am a little worried by the fact that they list many specific apps on their pages. I prefer a very minimalistic base that I build upon myself, like Arch If this is not the case, they should probably make note of that.

Wait, woah! Just noticed how tiny their install is. That's quite a feat, and now a lot makes sense - I was looking at it as a potential full-time desktop OS This looks like it would do nicely on my 256MB USB stick.

cardinals_fan · 2008-11-19 02:30:15

Ranguvar wrote:

Clear and controllable, I like. Only a testing rolling release, not so much Thanks, though. I will probably try it at least a little. Any specific examples of differences between NetBSD and FreeBSD in terms of configuration or otherwise?

It isn't entirely accurate, but check out http://polishlinux.org/choose/compariso … ro2=NetBSD

Here are a few personal observations:

* As I already said, I prefer Pkgsrc to Ports. It feels a bit simpler to me.

* I love the NetBSD installer, which is exceedingly simple and leaves almost all configuration for the user to perform manually. Sysinstall (FreeBSD) handles a ton of configuration and I don't like it much.

* FreeBSD is distributed, like Slackware, in a number of large images. You can always perform a minimal install (or use the network CD), but it's made to have at least CD 1 downloaded. NetBSD, on the other hand, packs an extremely minimal Xfree86 configuration on a small CD and expects you to install everything else yourself.

* FreeBSD now uses Subversion, while NetBSD has stuck with CVS.

* NetBSD focuses on portability over performance, but can easily be tweaked for speed.

* NetBSD has no proprietary NVIDIA drivers and lags behind FreeBSD in software support.

Ranguvar wrote:

And thanks for the SliTaz tip. I am a little worried by the fact that they list many specific apps on their pages. I prefer a very minimalistic base that I build upon myself, like Arch If this is not the case, they should probably make note of that.
Wait, woah! Just noticed how tiny their install is. That's quite a feat, and now a lot makes sense - I was looking at it as a potential full-time desktop OS This looks like it would do nicely on my 256MB USB stick.

I often consider using SliTaz as my full-time desktop. The printing support is fairly poor at the moment, but it's definitely an option for the future. Tazpkg/tazwok is very interesting.

Ranguvar · 2008-11-19 02:40:32

Thanks very much! All the *BSDs are ruled out because of NVIDIA anyways, as they do not offer 64-bit drivers for them, and unless the *BSDs absolutely blow Linux out of the water (something I doubt), I refuse to lose a 10-15% performance gain in x264, among other things, by going back to 32-bit. It seems NetBSD won't be a possible full-timer at all, though, if there's no hardware-accelerated NVIDIA at all.

I'll have to try them both, it seems. For fun, of course

Last edited by Ranguvar (2008-11-19 02:41:41)

Gullible Jones · 2008-11-19 03:35:19

One of the projects I'm interested in the progress of is Debian/kFreeBSD. Granted, I'm not the world's greatest fan of APT (though it's not actually as bad as my mistake with a noexec /var made it look), but it is IMHO vastly superior to FreeBSD's package management system.

cardinals_fan · 2008-11-19 03:48:17

Ranguvar wrote:

Thanks very much! All the *BSDs are ruled out because of NVIDIA anyways, as they do not offer 64-bit drivers for them, and unless the *BSDs absolutely blow Linux out of the water (something I doubt), I refuse to lose a 10-15% performance gain in x264, among other things, by going back to 32-bit. It seems NetBSD won't be a possible full-timer at all, though, if there's no hardware-accelerated NVIDIA at all.
I'll have to try them both, it seems. For fun, of course

I have completely lost my temper with NVIDIA. I'm hoping to move all my distros over to Xvesa if I can get a satisfactory resolution (1280x1024 works nicely, but I have to manually use the buttons on my monitor to move the image after every boot). They appear to have decided to completely stop supporting/caring about users of their earlier cards (I have a 6100).

A wise NetBSD saying:

NetBSD users are smart enough to accept that there's no 3D support

Ranguvar · 2008-11-19 03:54:43

Yeah... I've stuck with NVIDIA because it's historically played nicer with Linux... of course, right after I get the 9600GT (had an FX 5200 before), I learn that ATI open-sourced its drivers, which guarantees good Linux support, likely for a good while longer than a binary driver provided by the manufacturer would

Looking at info on the FreeBSD 64-bit situation, though, it seems NVIDIA has provided a list of things FreeBSD needs to add / improve upon on their end in order for 64-bit support to come, and not everything has been done. No clue whether they are legit roadblocks, annoying things NVIDIA doesn't have enough incentive to do themselves, or plain BS.

xaw · 2008-11-19 03:56:28

cardinals_fan wrote:

Ranguvar wrote:
Thanks very much! All the *BSDs are ruled out because of NVIDIA anyways, as they do not offer 64-bit drivers for them, and unless the *BSDs absolutely blow Linux out of the water (something I doubt), I refuse to lose a 10-15% performance gain in x264, among other things, by going back to 32-bit. It seems NetBSD won't be a possible full-timer at all, though, if there's no hardware-accelerated NVIDIA at all.
I'll have to try them both, it seems. For fun, of course
I have completely lost my temper with NVIDIA. I'm hoping to move all my distros over to Xvesa if I can get a satisfactory resolution (1280x1024 works nicely, but I have to manually use the buttons on my monitor to move the image after every boot). They appear to have decided to completely stop supporting/caring about users of their earlier cards (I have a 6100).
A wise NetBSD saying:
NetBSD users are smart enough to accept that there's no 3D support

My post is slightly off-topic, but NetBSD does have some (unofficial) working DRI support for a few gfx chipsets. More on the status of those here. I do sympathize with you on the Nvidia support however, its gotten a lot worse recently, unfornately.

Gullible Jones · 2008-11-21 23:27:39

So... I'm now trying OpenBSD.

The good:

- It's really fast. Boots as fast as Arch Linux, and feels lighter and more responsive. I've heard that OpenBSD performs worse than other BSDs, but it seems that it performs better (than FreeBSD 7 at least) for desktop tasks.
- It's clean and unbloated. No cruft at all.
- Bizarrely, it is the only BSD that recognizes my laptop's APM BIOS. (Yes, it turns out I have one.)
- The installer is wonderfully simple.
- For some reason, I like the package management - maybe because the output looks like pacman's.

The bad:
- On a previous attempt with OpenBSD, an unclean shutdown resulted in massive filesystem corruption. Not sure why.
- My laptop's speakers won't shut up. Currently working on this.
- Stuff like how to get services running, etc. is less clear than on FreeBSD.
- It can only use my ethernet card in half-duplex mode. Not sure how much of a problem this is - as far as I can tell it's not affecting my download speeds.

All told though it looks like this might be a winner.

Last edited by Gullible Jones (2008-11-21 23:28:50)

Borosai · 2008-11-22 04:58:34

I had wanted to try OpenBSD for some time, and today I gave it a shot (although it was destined to fail). I am currently running Windows XP, and although I read that OpenBSD doesn't work in VirtualBox, I decided to try anyway.

Well, it doesn't really work. At the end of the installation, I received a number of error messages. When I rebooted, I couldn't login as root, so I had to reset the password. Once I was logged in, I think I was able to install Zsh but the installation process was extremely slow. When I tried to install Vim, it kept on failing. So, it kind of works, but not really.

However, I must say I really like the installer: it's very straightforward. I didn't "use" it long enough to draw a solid conclusion, but the documentation seemed very solid, and the system is uncluttered. I know it has its limitations, but I'm definitely going to give it a better shot later on.

sand_man · 2008-11-22 06:09:14

I installed OpenBSD with qemu-kvm. Works perfectly in case you wanted to try that (if VirtualBox doesn't work).

Borosai · 2008-11-22 12:44:26

sand_man wrote:

I installed OpenBSD with qemu-kvm. Works perfectly in case you wanted to try that (if VirtualBox doesn't work).

Thanks for the tip: I will look into it.

Gullible Jones · 2008-11-22 15:14:28

Well... It also appears that sound on OpenBSD *sucks*, far worse than ALSA. At least for my sound card. Move a window over an MPlayer session, and you get sound stuttering.

That being said, I commend the efforts of the OpenBSD devs to make a generic HDA driver.

Borosai · 2008-12-03 06:06:49

So, at the moment I have Arch, OpenBSD 4.4 (qemu didn't start the installer, so I just ditched it since it's not important), and OpenSolaris 2008.11 running in VirtualBox (I'm bored).

Arch is great... that's all I can say: the installer, pacman, etc. A real joy to install, setup and maintain.

OpenBSD is hit or miss, but usually miss (due to VB). However, I installed it to learn more about it, and it works well enough for that: I can login, mess with the filesystem and read the documentation (good enough for me). I even managed to install Zsh, but my next installation failed a few times, so I didn't try again. I would really like to do more with it, such as follow the stable branch (or maybe even current), but it'll have to wait.

OpenSolaris... I really want to like it, and it's not exactly bad, but it's so slow. I don't think VB would affect it this much since it doesn't for Arch, but it takes 2+ minutes to boot, and about 1+ to shutdown. It's bloated like some popular linux distributions, but that's how they chose to put it together. I spent some time with it today, messing around with IPS (it's decent, but kind of slow too). I need to spend some more time with it. Maybe someday there'll be an Arch-like OpenSolaris release, with a simple base system installation that you can build on.

wuischke · 2008-12-03 08:30:55

Borosai: I can start OpenBSD in qemu without problems. I use kqemu (no kvm), but no "-kernel-kqemu"-option. Furthermore try to make sure you use the right qemu binary for the target architechture. (I use x86 on x86, but for instance for x86_64 on x86 I would need "qemu-system-x86_64" instead of qemu)

cardinals_fan · 2008-12-04 04:38:51

I never got OpenBSD working at my personal standards.

OT: I've started using SliTaz almost full-time

Arch Linux

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