Wednesday, June 06, 2007

My Box continued.....


well apart from the few times that i thought about formatting my freebsd partition completely, Its been a fun ride setting up freebsd.

BSD never lets u forget that it is after all a unix and not one of our friendly neighborhood desktop oses(Windows, Top linux Dist's).

* You get a lot of graphical utilities but most of them would not do what they're supposed to(no matter how much u plead/pray)

* Networking although a strong point of freebsd, gave me a lot of problems (mainly with db/web/im servers)

* No driver for my beetel ADSL2+ modem(through USB).It does work with the Ethernet option which unfortunately is not free(used by another comp) most of the time.(and thats why I am in windos right now :( )

* Fast!! it is awesome when it comes to loading and shutdown speeds. Compared to my windows os (where while shutting down, the screensaver comes up!! ), ah ...... well it basically kicks a$$.

* Its got Ports!! ports in freebsd have their advantages and disadvantages

adv : you get everything u will possibly need in ports
easy install / manage (gui with bpm,kpackage or command)
auto download and compile of dependencies recursively

disadv : you dont have much configuration options in most ports
many ports install number of packages which are not needed (example : i wanted to install jdk, it took 6-7 hours of downloading and compiling ports only to tell me that their is an error in the install script. it installed countless packages in that time including jre-linux and mozilla. why????????)
version conflicts for libraries, binaries(windows users can never understand this, i do only because i have worked on every major linux there is)
really long chain of dependencies for ports.(example : anything related to graphics/gui)
if i want to upgrade a desktop env(like gnome or kde), i need 2-4 days and 24 hour net(my own approximation with possible exaggeration)

I am using currently blackbox(on both freebsd and windows) as my desktop after trying out all the different options in the ports.
i liked bb the most since it is fast(as if freebsd was fast enough) and it has a lot of plugins available. also i like the mouse-scroll actions it has (workspace change, window switch, window minimize to its titlebar)

this is not a review or nothing but ill still give my opinion

*for someone who loves to have a hackable/configurable environment or is looking for an os for local/internet servers, freebsd is one of the better oses.(another is gentoo)
Obvious Warning :: Not for the faint of heart :), atleast not yet anyway. Although it has improved a lot from 5.4 which was the first Version i had installed (currently 6.2)

*and if you need a replacement for windows but have "some" knowledge about the internals of linux, dont go for freebsd. go for something like OpenSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandriva or other such big distributions.

*Further if u are a linux-nonothing use knoppix LiveCD for getting some handle on it or better yet try Xandr OS (the Damn thing is easier than windows)

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