Which BSD would an Arch User like?

Dusty · 2005-11-28 05:18:47

Hey guys,

I'm thinking of dropping Arch for a while, its starting to restrict me.... I've looked into other distros, nothing seems to appeal at all. So I thought I should round out my Unix education..... I've never used BSD, so I thought I'd try one of those.

Of NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD, which is the one that's going to be most "archesque"? Has anybody had any good or bad experiences with any of these? Which is best for a desktop/development system? Where's a good place to start learning them? How hard is installation and configuration? Are there any other BSD variants I should try?

Before you flame me, I'm not leaving Arch for good, you know this is my home, I'm just thinking of experimenting a bit... you know, an open marriage sort of thing... Sometimes you need to take a vacation to realize how good home is and stuff. To be honest, I'm a little annoyed with some of the recent changes here. Thought if I tried something else I'd realize how good I had it on Arch. ;-)

Thanks,

Dusty

cactus · 2005-11-28 06:12:50

Depends on what you want.
openbsd is known for security..not for bleeding edge software or performance.
freebsd is very gentoo-like. Lots of compiling. It does compile things very well though..not a hodge-podge by any means.
netbsd has a package system. I would probably go with netbsd if I were doing with a bsd right now..

oh, and dont forget pc-bsd, and dragonfly-bsd...
have fun.

Gullible Jones · 2005-11-28 11:42:08

FreeBSD has a package management system too... Simple, but IIRC it has dependency checking.

BTW, does NetBSD still use XFree86?

tomk · 2005-11-28 12:21:37

I've recently installed OpenBSD alongside Arch, for similar educational reasons. However my choice was hardware-related - Open is the only one that supports my prism2 USB wifi dongle. Installation went fine, once I understood the BSD approach to partitioning. I was actually able to do a wireless ftp install, booting off a 4.5MB iso.

I'm still getting the hang of their way of doing things. There's an rc.conf (looks nothing like ours), but local changes go in rc.conf.local. I've installed a few packages using the package management system - they're pretty up to date, and the dependencies were handled well. Any of these go in /usr/local. They've moved to xorg, since you mention it, Gullible.

I haven't touched most of it so far. Difficulties? Well, so far I'm persisting with ksh, their preferred shell, but I may change to bash - ksh seems pretty basic so far. And they don't have a driver for my synaptics touchpad - not surprising, but it's so much a part of the way I work. If you're thinking of working from cli only, there's no framebuffer support - may or may not be important to you.

They're the main points I can think of now. Let me know if there's anything else I can tell you.

zezaz · 2005-11-28 12:58:06

Hi Dusty,

I can only speak of my personal experience. I tested Net and FreeBSD about 2 years ago. Coming from a Debian background, it was very refreshing (i went back to Linux with Arch and it was even more refreshing ).

From what i saw, NetBSD has very interesting concepts, in particular in pkgsrc. However, it is not as up-to-date as many Linux distributions, especially Arch. For example, NetBSD still uses Gnome 2.10.

I tested FreeBSD after NetBSD, and was impressed by some parts of its packages handling. A site like freshports.org is really very nice for a FreeBSD user. Regarding packages, FreeBSD is more up-to-date than NetBSD, and globally i think that you can find docs more easily than for NetBSD.

I never tested OpenBSD, so i won't comment on this one.

For a first try my advice would be to go FreeBSD 6.0. It has good docs, binary packages are there with portinstall and portupgrade. Just spend some time before to read the install doc, especially on partitioning, like said tomk. Partitions slices in *BSDs are a specific concept, not hard to understand, if you read the docs.

Some things that can help you in the BSD world:
- linux binary emulation can be a very useful, especially for Java, Flash and Acrobat Reader
- there were no kernel binary packages when i used BSDs. Just ports. I believe it is the same today.

scottro · 2005-11-28 17:33:40

You could hobble over to http://www.bsdnexus.com where we put together a thing, trying to list the advantages of each BSD.

As Greg Lehey, author of, "The Complete FreeBSD," has stated, each system's main idea can be found in their slogan.

FreeBSD (my personal favorite, so keep that in mind as you read).

The Power to Serve is its slogan. It's probably the fastest on x86 at least, and has a wider collection of ports than any of the others. It's probably the easiest of them to get working as a desktop, and is probably the most powerful as a server. If you choose it, start with the 6.0, not the older versions.

Most things are compiled from source, which takes awhile. (This is true for all of them, though there are often precompiled packages available).

I'm going to push my page http://home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu/FreeBSD5x.html which has a few tips for Linux users.
(I'm writing this from a BSD box actually).

NetBSD
Slogan, Of course it runs NetBSD. It's quite portable, though I think truth be told, last time I checked, Debian had more archs than Net. Its portability results in a very clean code base. Fewer packages, a bit slower than Free (imho). It has its own quirks.

(I'll push another page of mine, though it's aimed more at the FreeBSD user, http://home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu/netbsd.html )

OpenBSD is perhaps a bit harder to install and its slogan is something like only one security hole in 10 years. Its emphasis is on security-it's probably the slowest, and may have the fewest number of ported applcations. However, many people can and do use it as their desktop.

LB06 · 2005-11-28 18:23:59

Depends on what you want.

If you want a server: all of them will do, although OpenBSD is the most secure by default (also a great OS to think and learn about security).

If you want a light workstation (say for developing): not really much of a difference here. If all your hw is supported, it won't really matter.

If you want a full blown multimedia workstation: Neither of them is as good as Linux, but if you have to, go with FreeBSD or fork/subbrach (desktopBSD, PC-BSD). If you want fancy stuff like iPod, dri, sound, etc, you'll find out that FreeBSD has the highest success ratio. Also, FreeBSD is generally the most up to date and has much more active mailing lists. Just do not expect it to work out of the box with either of the BSDs: flash, java(true disaster), games, webcam, etc. I believe that the more demanding users will come back to Linux.

I tried all three of them, although Free and OpenBSD are the two I most frequently used. I've only used NetBSD when it was hyped up during and after the 2.0 release.

Dusty · 2005-11-28 18:42:53

Thanks all for the extremely useful information. This slice notation in BSD, is that going to screw up my linux partitions? I especially do not want to lose my home directory. ;-) Is it possible to mount linux partitions under BSD?

Sounds like the suggestions are for FreeBSD, so will likely try that first. I'm looking for a 64 bit OS, and I see FreeBSD has one.

Thanks again!

Dusty

kpiche · 2005-11-28 20:03:10

I've used OpenBSD and FreeBSD and personally I like FreeBSD the best. Slices are not a big deal - I've had multi-boot machines with Linux, Windows, and FreeBSD. You actually create one partition for the whole system and subdivide that into slices.

lanrat · 2005-11-28 20:57:51

Dusty wrote:

This slice notation in BSD, is that going to screw up my linux partitions? I especially do not want to lose my home directory. ;-) Is it possible to mount linux partitions under BSD?

Your linux partitions should be safe but using them under fbsd is a different thing. AFAIK it depends on the filesystem type. Be careful.

From gentoo guides:

FreeBSD uses UFS/UFS-2 as its filesystems and has no official support for e.g. ReiserFS or XFS. However, there are projects for adding read-only support for these filesystems. Accessing ext2/ext3 partitions is already possible, but you cannot install your system on them.

More info in pc-bsd faq

I think since version 6 it should be possible to use reiserfs (readonly)with loading only some kernel module.

FreeBSD from linux user's perspective:
1, 2, 3.

tomk · 2005-11-28 21:01:05

I haven't gone anywhere near my Arch partitions with OpenBSD. The only Linux filesystem it can handle is ext2, and that's read only, so I've created a small ext2 partition for sharing. Linux can also mount the BSD slices read only as long as you compile the necessary support into your kernel (or read/write if you like those DANGEROUS kernel options).

arooaroo · 2005-11-28 21:17:22

Go on Dusty, try Ubuntu, you know you want to!

deficite · 2005-11-28 22:03:30

When it comes to the BSD's I have the most experience with FreeBSD. It was pretty nice, but I don't like having to use 5 billion tools to do a simple task. Arch seems more straightforward and lighter than FreeBSD.

To recommend a *BSD I need to know what you're going to be doing with your computer. For a desktop I'd definitely go with FreeBSD. For a server I'd look into OpenBSD, although I would probably use FreeBSD simply because I know it better. If I was using an architecture not supported by FreeBSD or OpenBSD I might look at NetBSD. From what I've read OpenBSD has the best wireless support.

There are quite a few derivitives of FreeBSD now with different purposes (and branched from different series of it such as 4.9)

rayjgu3 · 2005-11-28 22:47:21

i played with freebsd & the live ones> freesbie ,frenzie last year
check em out if you put it on a laptop with synaptics touch pad mouse youll have to tweak a file
i believe " /boot/devices.hints " <<dont hold me to location youll also need to get in same place i belive if you use intel8x0 for sound if you use snd_via82xx for sound you need to patch kernel
i learned a bit from using it but i have no desire to go back to it it took me like 2 hours to get firefox w/ flash-plugin i dont want to go through all that compiling for the same results i get in arch with less time i get same programs in arch in like 5 min hm 2 hours vs 5 min which would you stay with id recommend to try it but staying with it is your choice
my suggestion grab freesbie look around it install it onto a free partition & for that you make 1 primary partition for it inside there bsd will make the partitions it will use if i remember correctly linux & windows seen it as 1 partition but bsd see's all its created partitions if i remember correctly
good luck

scottro · 2005-11-28 23:40:05

FreeBSD 6.0 can mount reiser (and has been able to mount ext2 and 3 for awhile.)

Again, see my page on FreeBSD which has details on mounting Linux from FreeBSD and vice versa.

I dunno about using your /home under FreeBSD--I've never tried that. It depends what is in there, and what you're planning to use.

Keep in mind that FreeBSD does require a primary partition.

If you want a quick KDE setup, you can try PCBSD first, which installs with a few clicks and is more designed for the desktop user.

You'll find that people at freebsdforums.org and bsdnexus' forums to be helpful too.

pixel · 2006-04-01 21:54:43

only OpenBSD. FreeBSD is too bloated, and NetBSD is more of a research project.

Gullible Jones · 2006-04-01 23:34:30

Umm, NetBSD was the first of them and is in very widespread use... In fact there are quite a lot of NetBSD machines on the list of servers with the highest uptimes.

Paul · 2006-04-02 04:58:08

netbsd and dragonfly use pkgsrc / pkgadd package manager; the latter fetches binary packages.

Check out dragonfly, the project has some very interesting goals.

pixel · 2006-04-02 10:35:22

Gullible Jones wrote:

Umm, NetBSD was the first of them

You are right, but its goals are more concerned about researching than providing a stable and secure server environment. They trying to port it to every known architecture "Of course it runs NetBSD"
OpenBSD is a fork off NetBSD which focused on security, simplicity and coming back to 386BSD roots and Jolitz ideas.
For me it's the simplest *BSD system that's also focused more on binary packages than all others, and that's why any Archer would be naturally interested in it.

syamajala · 2006-04-02 13:43:32

Gullible Jones wrote:

FreeBSD has a package management system too... Simple, but IIRC it has dependency checking.
BTW, does NetBSD still use XFree86?

no. you can use xorg. i don't know if they are up to xorg 7 yet, but 6.8 worked fine the last time i used netbsd.

scottro · 2006-04-02 14:18:52

If you want to use NetBSDs xorg, the best thing to do is choose to not install X during installation, then, install xorg from the metapackage. However, pkgsrc has a nice thing with options where you can avoid downloading several drivers you don't need. If you do choose to install X during installation, it still installs xfree86.

(See my tutorial on an unofficial NetBSD wiki
http://wiki.aydogan.net/index.php/How_t … th_pkgsrc)

FreeBSD's ports are not what I'd call simple. There are about 14,000 ports, although it's mostly build from source. There are packages, but there are many ports without packages.

Of the three, I'd say (subjective, no benchmarks) that FreeBSD gives the best performance. I wouldn't call it bloated either. A base install is pretty lightweight.

syamajala · 2006-04-02 14:24:05

the icons from the main page of that wiki are really nice ;-p

LB06 · 2006-04-02 22:26:44

If you do not mind taking the long and tedious (source based) road, I'd suggest pkgsrc. It's much more consistent and simple than ports are. It contains less software though.

After several months of ports on FreeBSD, I did a pkg_delete -a, removed my /usr/port/ and bootstrapped /usr/pkg/. It's really underrated, if you ask me.

P.S NetBSD is supposed to do really well on uniprocessor architectures, because they do not support fine-grained locking. Instead, they still rely on the big giant lock. The downside to this is that NetBSD scales less wel to multi-processor environments.

scottro · 2006-04-02 22:52:18

Again totally subjective, but...

When NetBSD 3 came out, I heard how there was supposed to be better performance. I still feel that FreeBSD is faster.

This does't mean that Net is a dog, its performance is quite good.

As for pksrc vs. ports...I never tried that,using pkgsrc on FreeBSD.

Having used it though, on both Net and DragonFly, what do you find so superior to ports? To me, there seems to be little difference, There are certainly some nice things about pkgsrc, but I havne't seen something so dramatic that it would merit the extra work of replacing it with pkgsrc on Free.

(Hopefully, it's clear that the question is being asked as an attempt to learn something, not as a challenge. I should add that I'm not a programmer,so it's quite possible that there is something obvious that I simply don't know.)

jaboua · 2006-04-03 15:45:07

snd_via82xx worked fine here, I compiled snd_via82c686 or something like that into the kernel on FreeBSD.

I have most experience with FreeBSD, used it for about a half year between Gentoo and Arch. Nice OS, but IMO their package tools could be a bit more streamlined. It supported all my (a bit outdated) hardware IIRC, except the webcam which won't work correctly on linux either. Of the distros I've tried, Arch was the one that reminded me the most of FreeBSD. It has two package managemant systems: ports (source-based, like ABS with Makefiles instead of PKGBUILDs) and pkg_* (binary based, more basic than Pacman but it does the job). In addition, you can install stuff like portaudit to be warned of packages that pose a security risc for your system before you install them and portupgrade, a frontend to ports. The kernel in BSD is compiled otherwise too, prepare to edit the kernel configuration file by hand ! It's not hard though, the default config is well commented and the handbook does handholding for compiling kernels, as well as most other stuff in freebsd. A kernel compile is not necesarry either. Also, I didn't like their boot manager or whatever it's called again... You should add an entry to GRUB/LILO instead.

I've used NetBSD a little bit too, 2.1 or something. I didn't like it... Dunno about 3.x though, got to try that some time.

Arch Linux

#1 2005-11-28 05:18:47

Which BSD would an Arch User like?

#2 2005-11-28 06:12:50

Re: Which BSD would an Arch User like?

#3 2005-11-28 11:42:08

Re: Which BSD would an Arch User like?

#4 2005-11-28 12:21:37

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#5 2005-11-28 12:58:06

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#6 2005-11-28 17:33:40

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#7 2005-11-28 18:23:59

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#8 2005-11-28 18:42:53

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#10 2005-11-28 20:57:51

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#25 2006-04-03 15:45:07

Re: Which BSD would an Arch User like?

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