Heres what I would like it to do:
run beryl w/ my nvidia (Geforce 5200fx) card.
work with my wifi card(s) I have one atheros (works well with madwifi) and one rt2570(rt2500usb) card. Either one is fine
Let me do all the normal computing (internet, office, music, video, etc.)
let me program (I assume this works)
and it is also very important: I want it to be mainly a binary OS.

Would you guys recommend bsd is there anything that bsd doese better than linux?

(I tried pcbsd and got stonewalled at the part where I had to build my wifi drivers (I needed the internet to get the kernel..))

dolby · 2007-03-14 02:22:19

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arc … vs_FreeBSD

form what ive heard pcbsd is probably the worst choice of the bsd's
if id try anything that would be freebsd

cactus · 2007-03-14 03:17:09

linux has better driver support, and more 'cutting edge' desktop features.
the bsd's are pretty rock solid stable, well integrated, and excellent platforms for servers

AndyRTR · 2007-03-14 06:11:25

i wonder if we will ever see attemps to start an Arch*BSD port - ArchSolaris could also be interesting.

Acid7711 · 2007-03-14 06:28:45

I dabbled around with a bsd/gentoo mixture wayyyyyyyy back in the day, fairly common combination considering where it's ways originate from

I've found pure bsd to be unresponsive and slow on i686 procs. I dunknow, maybe it's just me but it's i383 optimization kinda draws me away from it.

Last edited by Acid7711 (2007-03-14 06:32:14)

iphitus · 2007-03-14 08:26:02

AndyRTR wrote:

i wonder if we will ever see attemps to start an Arch*BSD port - ArchSolaris could also be interesting.

Consider me on board That would rock. Been using freeBSD fairly extensively on my laptop recently and have been loving it. Have even considered doing Arch*BSD, if it weren't only for time...

Acid7711: Pretty unfair comparison, as *BSD can be compiled for i686 too.

James

jnengland77 · 2007-03-15 22:22:51

I think it would be cool to have FreeBSD + Pacman. I've tried FreeBSD once, but the binary support sucks from what I experienced in version 6.1(-rc1 or 2). Might have been the fact it was an RC release, but a lot of things didn't work. Performance was nice though, and have thought for a while it would be cool to have a binary(i686/x86_64) FreeBSD with Pacman as the package manager.

Mr Green · 2007-03-16 06:35:50

Heard much about BSD been meaning to try it but which one? Free Open etc ... ArchBSD emmm sounds cool

Xilon · 2007-03-16 07:10:07

I recall a project that is porting pacman to BSD, I'm trying to find it but seem unable to. I want to check out FreeBSD as well but it seems that it is more focused on compiling rather than binary packages, but at least to a smaller degree than Gentoo. Arch*BSD I would immediately try out, though I am very happy with Arch on the desktop.

Edit: I can only find this http://wiki.dragonflybsd.org/index.cgi/Pacman_Packages

Last edited by Xilon (2007-03-16 07:11:10)

AndyRTR · 2007-03-16 08:05:30

There are two ways possible:

1) take a former ArchLINUX, replace the Linux kernel and adopt all the rest to make it running with the new (probably Free)BSD kernel. that I would call ArchBSD or like Debian named it ArchkBSD

2) run a true (Free*, open* or whatever)BSD and compile there pacman (maybe use srcpac additionally) and make it the package manager of that system replacing their native solutions. That would still remain a true FreeBSD with just another package manager instead of their pkgsource & Co.

I'm also interested in such a project based on 1) . But so far I haven't tried any *BSD or Solaris more than booting their LiveCDs.

lucke · 2007-03-16 11:19:53

Someone has been porting pacman to DragonFlyBSD.

Last edited by lucke (2007-03-16 11:20:06)

deficite · 2007-03-16 16:02:35

AndyRTR, please keep us updated on whether you decide to make a ArchBSD. I'd be very interested in helping out with it and testing it.

jnengland77 · 2007-03-16 18:01:11

I didn't realize someone had ported Pacman to DragonFlyBSD. I tried to run DragonFlyBSD in Vmware server a while back. I didn't get far. I also tried the Debian port of FreeBSD.

Sad, but I probably couldn't do much on *BSD anyway or at least 3D-wise I have an ATi video card. Still would be cool to have Arch*BSD.

Last edited by jnengland77 (2007-03-16 18:02:44)

cactus · 2007-03-16 18:45:51

Porting pacman to "gnu on solaris" would rock too.
Like Nexenta but with pacman instead of apt.

AndyRTR · 2007-03-16 19:33:19

Somebody here with informations what we would need to port? Is it only the kernel and some related packages to adopt and rebuild or does it mean to bootstrap again the whole distribution like we did for x86_64? maybe somebody can point us to relevant documentations from Nexenta, Gentoo/DebiankBSD or somewhere else.

If more stuff come up here for a concrete project i will move this thread to the ports forum.

i'm always interested in porting to a new arch or basics. and there's also the PS3 coming with the cell cpu - but right now i don't have that much time to start leading another port and beeing again on my own.

phrakture · 2007-03-16 20:10:31

AndyRTR wrote:

Somebody here with informations what we would need to port? Is it only the kernel and some related packages to adopt and rebuild or does it mean to bootstrap again the whole distribution like we did for x86_64? maybe somebody can point us to relevant documentations from Nexenta, Gentoo/DebiankBSD or somewhere else.

It'd be a lot of work. You would have to rebuild everything... new kernel requires a new libc (which is NOT glibc - see http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/lib/libc/ ), which then requires everything to be rebuilt against it. Please note that a freebsd build would also require multiple architectures. This would be a huge project.

lucke · 2007-03-16 20:23:04

i686 would suffice for a start - especially considering that there is no i686 FreeBSD (only i386 and x86_64).

As I have lots of free time lately and am in quite a tinkering mood (and also looking more and more in the direction of BSDs as of late), I'd actually gladly sink my teeth into it.

(Debian GNU/kFreeBSD uses glibc, to be precise)

Last edited by lucke (2007-03-16 20:38:05)

iphitus · 2007-03-16 23:11:10

lucke: i686 is just some compile flags over FreeBSD. Everything in FreeBSD can be compiled i686 if you wish, they have just chosen not to.

James

lucke · 2007-03-16 23:42:16

Well, Arch could be rebuild i386 as well, if anyone really wanted. The fact is that the packages in FreeBSD are built for i386, not i686. That's why i686 (pacman) packages would be double interesting (filling a niche, eh?).

Unless I'm missing something else.

deficite · 2007-03-17 07:24:18

Whenever I used FreeBSD I thought it was easier just to use the ports and compile everything myself. My first kernel compiling experience was with FreeBSD (the default kernel didn't sound turned on by default. I don't know if that's changed since then)

Last edited by deficite (2007-03-17 07:24:59)

Mikko777 · 2007-03-18 00:37:52

Guess its like linux ain't small enough so you need to support crappy bsd and macos's as well?

Master One · 2007-03-18 06:27:41

The question is, what benefit would Arch*BSD offer over ArchLinux? The concept behind the BSDs may be superior, if it were not for the small userbase and lacking driver support (whatever you try, and whatever machine you use, be sure that there is always support for at least one device missing). I once played around with FreeBSD, PCBSD and OpenBSD, but in the end I dropped them and returned to Linux due to the worse hardware-support.

Stalwart · 2007-03-18 15:09:25

FreeBSD has noticably faster TCP/IP stack and performs better with MySQL. I'd like to have ArchBSD for servers

deficite · 2007-03-18 16:19:46

Mikko777 wrote:

Guess its like linux ain't small enough so you need to support crappy bsd and macos's as well?

Spoken like a true fanboy. I hope you were saying that in good humor?

Master One wrote:

The question is, what benefit would Arch*BSD offer over ArchLinux? The concept behind the BSDs may be superior, if it were not for the small userbase and lacking driver support (whatever you try, and whatever machine you use, be sure that there is always support for at least one device missing). I once played around with FreeBSD, PCBSD and OpenBSD, but in the end I dropped them and returned to Linux due to the worse hardware-support.

Were you using it in a desktop fashion? I'd like ArchBSD for servers, not for desktop machines. When it comes to server stuff, *BSD actually sometimes has better drivers than Linux (some of which become Linux drivers, I may add. Linux gets a lot from the *BSD's). However, I do have to say that I ran FreeBSD as my desktop operating system for quite some time and actually liked it. I switched over to Linux simply because I liked the 2.6.0 kernel (which had just first come out) and I read about this neat distro called Arch Linux. If it weren't for Arch Linux I'd probably still be using FreeBSD.

sh__ · 2007-03-18 22:18:25

Stalwart wrote:

FreeBSD has noticably faster TCP/IP stack and performs better with MySQL.

Can you provide some pointers to benchmarks to back this up? Just curious.

Arch Linux

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