Thoughts on BSD

sa · 2009-04-27 01:14:59

An ArchBSD would rock my socks. I've always appreciated OpenBSD a lot, but I never really took the time to learn it. If I had a server of my own, I'd surely learn it.

Wra!th · 2009-05-01 07:47:06

This from a normal level user. I used FreeBSD in the past, and last time as a desktop for about a year. No serious complaints there..apart from some internet lagginess(not sure why).
Starting yesterday I dualboot Arch with OpenBSD and I LOVE IT! Getting Xorg to run was a oneliner piece of cake. cpu scalling comes working out of the box! I just modify apmdflags to start with cooling mode ("-C"), and it just works.
[offtopic]
I have one HUGE problem with my wireless though..the card works ok and all..but I can't connect. been struggling with this since I installed...any OpenBSD wireless users PLEASE help! Unsecured AP, bwi-airport is in /etc/firmware, ifconfig nwid "ap-name", then dhclient bwi0. and it keeps trying to auth but not connecting.
[/offtopic]
All in all..if I get wireless working (I have no other source of internet ) I'ma spend more and more time in OpenBSD

Last edited by Wra!th (2009-05-01 07:51:15)

DawiX · 2009-05-11 16:00:29

My actual *BSD experience is quite positive. I use PC-BSD on my desktop (everything just works out of the box :-) ). However my notebook is pure Archlinux. And I have just started to play with openBSD on my Soekris and I just love it so far.

btw ArchBSD hybride would be just pure awesomeness

kourosh · 2009-05-11 20:56:39

I've been meaning to try NetBSD for a long time, i really like it, packages seem a bit outdated though (maybe im too used to Arch's newness), and the zyd driver is a pain, least it was when i tried FreeBSD.

If I can get zyd to work fine, and get all the apps I get in Arch Linux at a fairly recent stable release, then I'd be happy to try it.

With 5.0 I've got an iso, need to burn it onetime...

Bison · 2009-05-12 14:53:52

Thoroughly enjoyed freebsd except for two things:

ports not as simple as its made out to be
Lots of things didn't work for me out of the box

moljac024 · 2009-05-12 15:01:51

Bison wrote:

Thoroughly enjoyed freebsd except for two things:
ports not as simple as its made out to be
Lots of things didn't work for me out of the box

I don't think many people have a problem with something not working out of the box, but when something doesn't work out of the box I guess you get scared shitless it won't work at all (and it most often does not)

Bison · 2009-05-12 17:22:54

moljac024 wrote:

Bison wrote:
Thoroughly enjoyed freebsd except for two things:
ports not as simple as its made out to be
Lots of things didn't work for me out of the box
I don't think many people have a problem with something not working out of the box, but when something doesn't work out of the box I guess you get scared shitless it won't work at all (and it most often does not)

Resulted in many hours of trying to 'fix' packages, or whatever ports calls them. That wasn't a whole lot of fun

sand_man · 2009-05-24 23:25:09

I'm going to install PC-BSD on a spare partition tonight when I get home. What can I expect? I'm actually kind of excited

I would just install in a VM but I heard BSD's don't like running in a VM?

Obi-Lan · 2009-05-25 19:02:48

I tried PCBSD with new harddisk for a couple of days. Installation went without problems (except some mysterious USB keyboard problem) and everything including nvidia drivers worked out-of-box. I messed around with system and ports for few days but I didn't get excited from freebsd world and did install Arch over it. Things just goes smoother with pacman.

Btw freebsd ports gave me some flashbacks from my Gentoo times. Not really interested to compile anything anymore.

sand_man · 2009-05-26 03:37:46

I didn't get time to do it...I will eventually

tomd123 · 2009-05-26 18:17:59

sand_man wrote:

I'm going to install PC-BSD on a spare partition tonight when I get home. What can I expect? I'm actually kind of excited
I would just install in a VM but I heard BSD's don't like running in a VM?

From experience, that's true.
Openbsd or netbsd segfaults in vbox last time i tried installing, and none of the bsds actually had a working net connection in the vm

Rip-Rip · 2009-05-26 20:11:12

tomd123 wrote:

sand_man wrote:
I'm going to install PC-BSD on a spare partition tonight when I get home. What can I expect? I'm actually kind of excited
I would just install in a VM but I heard BSD's don't like running in a VM?
From experience, that's true.
Openbsd or netbsd segfaults in vbox last time i tried installing, and none of the bsds actually had a working net connection in the vm

The last time I tried, FreeBSD runs perfectly on VirtualBox, including a working net connection.

tomd123 · 2009-05-26 23:03:36

Rip-Rip wrote:

tomd123 wrote:
sand_man wrote:
I'm going to install PC-BSD on a spare partition tonight when I get home. What can I expect? I'm actually kind of excited
I would just install in a VM but I heard BSD's don't like running in a VM?
From experience, that's true.
Openbsd or netbsd segfaults in vbox last time i tried installing, and none of the bsds actually had a working net connection in the vm
The last time I tried, FreeBSD runs perfectly on VirtualBox, including a working net connection.

I tried this quite a while ago so it might have gotten better ( could have been vbox's fault for that matter )

peets · 2009-05-27 02:40:46

OpenBSD has release songs which make me want to try it very very much.

Primoz · 2009-05-27 11:15:52

I've tried PC-BSD, somehow got pagefault...
But I'm still interested in.
And any OS (other than GNU/Linux) with Arch would be dream.
Personally I would like to see Minix3 with pacman and "Arch"...
But Arch with kFreeBSD or open/net is much more possible.

madalu · 2009-05-27 12:28:31

I'm not going to be saying anything new here (or even anything worth reading), but these are my thoughts:

If you're using today's hardware (i.e., a recent notebook, netbook, wireless card, video card, etc.), then Arch offers the best of both worlds --- the elegance and simplicity of BSD-style configs with the fast-development of the linux kernel and the size of the Linux user community.

In my experience trying to install a BSD on newish or exotic hardware works only a small fraction of the time

With Linux, IMHO, you get somewhat wild and chaotic growth but amazingly up-to-date compatibility. The potential danger, of course, is that depending on how a distro is put (or cobbled) together, the system risks losing elegance and simplicity.

Most big distros (for which I have a great deal of admiration) solve this problem at the level of the GUI --- i.e., they patch together a bunch of scripts and a huge number of dependencies in the Desktop Enviornment to ensure that everything works together out of the box.

Arch (for which I have boundless admiration) solves this problem below the GUI --- i.e., it makes basic system configuration clean, elegant, fully transparent, and easily accessible from the command line. This allows the user to maintain the system much more cleanly (like a BSD).

Needless to say, my personal preference is for the latter solution.

karol · 2009-05-27 13:09:10

Primoz wrote:

And any OS (other than GNU/Linux) with Arch would be dream.
Personally I would like to see Minix3 with pacman and "Arch"...

By "Arch" do you mean 'pacman' (that would render your second sentence silly) the four letters: a, r, c, h or sth else? How is openBSD's way of doing things worse than pacman + ABS? What is it in MINIX3 that you love?

lucke · 2009-05-27 13:34:21

karol wrote:

How is openBSD's way of doing things worse than pacman + ABS?

I find package management in BSDs vastly inferior to pacman/ABS.

Primoz · 2009-05-27 15:02:22

karol wrote:

Primoz wrote:
And any OS (other than GNU/Linux) with Arch would be dream.
Personally I would like to see Minix3 with pacman and "Arch"...
By "Arch" do you mean 'pacman' (that would render your second sentence silly) the four letters: a, r, c, h or sth else? How is openBSD's way of doing things worse than pacman + ABS? What is it in MINIX3 that you love?

By Arch I meant the "Arch way"... and Arch packages (eg built for i686 and x86_64 in mind and especially KDEmod packages)
And I've read a article on Minix3 once. The most intriguing thing about it is the reincarnation server. Even though I can't really say that my Arch has problems with things crashing...
So not much of a need for it, especially in kernel space.
Well I've only tried PC-BSD and never got my head around it...
To put it bluntly the thing I would miss the most in other distro / OS is KDEmod packages and the familiarity of pacman.
Even though I was using Kubuntu for a long time I never as good with apt-get as I'm now with pacman...

Misfit138 · 2009-05-27 15:11:31

lucke wrote:

karol wrote:
How is openBSD's way of doing things worse than pacman + ABS?
I find package management in BSDs vastly inferior to pacman/ABS.

I would have to agree. It is too crude and time consuming to manage such a system as a desktop for me.

karol · 2009-05-27 15:13:57

I agree w/ Misfit and that's what I think you meant, lucke.
CRUX felt like openBSD package-management-wise, Arch feels like Debian :-)

Last edited by karol (2009-05-27 15:15:10)

oli · 2009-05-30 17:38:06

lucke wrote:

karol wrote:
How is openBSD's way of doing things worse than pacman + ABS?
I find package management in BSDs vastly inferior to pacman/ABS.

Well because binary package management is more or less some kind of a stepchild among *BSD operating systems. But ports work like a charm and there are different wrappers (portmaster etc.) to please the user with a plethora of useful functionalities . Maybe you should compare *BSD with Gentoo's emerge or Archlinux's aur plus some wrapper like yaourt. At the moment you're comparing apples and oranges. And don't forget NetBSD pkgsrc is very different from FreeBSD ports or compared to OpenBSD ports. The latter doesn't even officially support ports (so you have to live with certain problems) and packages (binary ones) are rather old. It depends on a certain point of view: it's maybe 'inferior' for your daily use because you like frontends etc. pp, other people prefer KISS in terms of keep it simple stupid (but useful and reliable).

esh · 2009-06-03 11:38:05

When I was setting up the 'next generation' network at a small company I tested out a bunch of the BSD systems. The most appealing thing to me about them was the coherency of the kernel with the base system. They also had a very very small install base (not interested in Xorg on a server).

I mostly tried NetBSD and OpenBSD for running a combined webserver/SQL database, with FreeBSD running an NFS/Samba fileserver. They all were hooked into a LDAP server on a Red Hat box for authorisation. What I was looking for was mostly 'out of the box' operation. All of these apart from the Red Hat box were virtualised systems under VMWare (that's how we tend to run things), and we swap and switch VMs with needs. OpenBSD didn't work under VM at all without hefty prodding.

OpenBSD was a curiosity. It has its own version of Apache 1, but fortunately a package to get FastCGI PHP to work with it, also with the Suhosin patches applied which was pleasing. Very nice out-of-the-box security, two thumbs up for that. The performance was about 1/3 out of the box as with NetBSD though which was frankly baffling, though I managed to boost it a little with some configuration of the SQL server (I think this may have been SMP related). Also it hadn't set up my backspace key in the root shell which drove me slightly nuts to begin with.

NetBSD likes compiling stuff, I learnt that pretty fast. I didn't mind the configuration model either, and has the tiniest base system in history. Snappy as well.

FreeBSD was fairly trivial to set up as a file server. It has lots of packages ready to roll which was nice. I didn't benchmark it. Some while ago (2005) I tried it on a laptop but I basically ended up fighting every step of the way, from screen resolution to cpu scaling. I did get it going in the end though (apart from suspend/resume, but I can't get that going on Linux either...).

I settled on Debian for all the servers OS' in the end mostly due to available binary packages and support. Plus the BSD SMP was still in early days back then. Maybe I'll give them all another check over when I build the 3rd generation network. I never tried DragonflyBSD, it looked a bit niche for me, and in its early stages.

Themaister · 2009-06-03 12:38:03

karol wrote:

I agree w/ Misfit and that's what I think you meant, lucke.
CRUX felt like openBSD package-management-wise, Arch feels like Debian :-)

Arch feels like nothing else, in a positive way.

Last edited by Themaister (2009-06-03 12:38:22)

karol · 2009-06-03 12:53:36

Arch feels like nothing else, in a positive way.

So maybe "Arch feels like Debian done right"? ;-)

Arch Linux

#76 2009-04-27 01:14:59

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#77 2009-05-01 07:47:06

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#78 2009-05-11 16:00:29

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#79 2009-05-11 20:56:39

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#80 2009-05-12 14:53:52

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#81 2009-05-12 15:01:51

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#82 2009-05-12 17:22:54

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#83 2009-05-24 23:25:09

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#84 2009-05-25 19:02:48

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#85 2009-05-26 03:37:46

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#86 2009-05-26 18:17:59

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#87 2009-05-26 20:11:12

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#88 2009-05-26 23:03:36

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#89 2009-05-27 02:40:46

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#90 2009-05-27 11:15:52

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#91 2009-05-27 12:28:31

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#92 2009-05-27 13:09:10

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#93 2009-05-27 13:34:21

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#94 2009-05-27 15:02:22

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#95 2009-05-27 15:11:31

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#96 2009-05-27 15:13:57

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#97 2009-05-30 17:38:06

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#98 2009-06-03 11:38:05

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#99 2009-06-03 12:38:03

Re: Thoughts on BSD

#100 2009-06-03 12:53:36

Re: Thoughts on BSD

Board footer