After I had cvsup'ed, I decided to give it a go and play a DVD using VideoLAN. After about 40 minutes of compiling it and its dependancies I had VidioLAN up and running, only to get a black output window (the video was playing fine and the sound was fine but it would render black and it would take an awful lot of cpu, error messages on the terminal would appear, Google didn't help). After hitting a few random buttons on its window to make it stop, FreeBSD would just crash and the machine would reboot. Upon rebooting I installed Ogle which would give me the error message "DVDsetRoot is not set" or something to this effect. I have all devfs links needed setup (/dev/dvd, /dev/cdrom, /dev/cdrom1, /dev/cdrw) however Ogle was possibly trying to find a device link that doesn't exist. I had to tell it "ogle /dev/dvd" to get it to open the right device. After doing that, Ogle would play the DVD just fine, even with overlay capabilities. Totem with Xine backend would also work with no problem. But regarding VLC 0.7, still not joy.
A few more bugs I found were that the gnomegames package would not get installed properly thinking that the 2.2.0 version is installed (please note that this was a clean installation), and so the HighScrores would not get recorded. Upon forcing the gnomegames-2.4.1.1 package to re-install from the CD, it would then install all the right files in the right places. Another problem was that any CD or DVD it mounted would not have a title but it would show as jibberish, it would have a filename with weird characters. This is apparently a known bug, fixed in the CVS for Gnome 2.5. As I mentioned above, I gave the right permissions to all devices/mounted dirs and told sysctl to let my users mount CDs, but still no joy with Nautilus.
Other ports problems include the libvorbis and libogg telling me that they are newer versions available (check screenshot) and upon upgrading them they keep telling me the same thing (I fear that the bug is just a typo in their version the db looks up), while every gtk application I compiled creates dependencies to the /devel/qmake package for some reason. I wouldn't normally mind, but trying to use portupgrade would tell me that the db has problems because of these dependencies. Running "pkgdb -F" to fix these packages, it would tell me that all those packages have "stale dependencies" (whatever that means) and it would just not properly fix them (I recreated the index.db too with no results).
Later, I wanted to mount (read-only) my Fedora ext3 partition using the EXT2FS driver. I do not understand why the actual mount_ext2fs command exists while the kernel module for it is not compiled and even more weirdly, while the "option EXT2FS" is now completely removed from the GENERIC kernel conf file. From the moment the mount_ext2fs command is present to the system the option should have been in the kernel conf file, commented out even.
Not all is bad though. On the upside of FreeBSD you will find its speed. On my AthlonXP 1600+ 1.4 GHz, FreeBSD boots in about 16-18 seconds, the same as a lite Slackware or Gentoo, but way faster comparatively on other popular Linuces like Fedora or Mandrake or SuSE. As I have mentioned in the past Slackware was the fastest platform to run X/Gnome/KDE according to my tests, but the crown of DE speed now goes to FreeBSD 5.2. GTK apps are a bit faster than in Slackware overall but applications load significantly faster on FreeBSD.
The ports tree --while time consuming when compiling a port and its dependancies-- it has its advantages. It is well-maintained and generally trouble-free (just not always as I demonstrated above). Linux solutions with Red Carpet, Debian, Gentoo etc., also have good results though today, so I don't see the FreeBSD Ports anymore as the big selling point of the OS. Once upon a time this was a big bragging point for the Linux/Unix folks, but today is nothing that would make any new user or "switcher" awe. Especially when there are not many binary packages to choose from, it can be a disadvantage to subject the time users long compilation times (e.g. compiling OO.o could take many-many hours as it downloads Java, Mozilla and other such monster software to compile them as dependancies).
The big advantage FreeBSD still has today is that it is not a bunch of kernels, then gnu utils on top and then a gazillion of other third party apps on top of that. The OS feels integrated, it is a system designed and maintained from the ground up, not like any random distribution. This is a major selling point and is what makes FreeBSD feel like a trustworthy product.
In my opinion, FreeBSD rocks as a server, but it is pretty poor as an "out of the box" desktop system is concerned. But then again, FreeBSD is a server system in its heart, a real Unix; it is just that I can't overlook the fact that they ship with desktop software and so this has to work as well as the system utilities and servers. I might sound like a mega-whiner here, but despite all these discomforts I had to go through again since my previous 4.x installation, extra work that the user has to do, and the occassional unexpected bugs, I still like FreeBSD. As long you stick to it and spend a few hours (or days, depending on your experience) fixing and configuring your way through to get the results you are looking for, you should be able to get a good setup and a worthy system to do your day to day job. It doesn't come with all comforts that most Linuces come with (Flash, Java pre-installed, media software etc) but it is a worthwhile experience and it is generally very stable.
If you are after the "experience" go for it. If you want a solid server system, go for it too. If you are after an easy-to-use desktop system that doesn't require you to learn anything new, then you better look elsewhere.
Good points: Faster than Linux on the desktop (at least compared to kernel 2.4.x distros), easy to configure via its well-documented conf files, feels integrated and like a mature Unix that you can trust (at least as a server).
Bad points:Limited 'exotic' hardware support, silly little annoyances all over the place, not many binary packages available and so compilations from ports may take ages.
Installation: 7/10
Hardware Support: 6/10
Ease of use: 7/10
Features: 7.5/10
Credibility: 7/10 (stability, bugs, security)
Speed: 8.5/10 (throughput, UI responsiveness, latency)
Overall: 7.16
- "FreeBSD review, Page 1"
- "FreeBSD review, Page 2"
