Building a (rather old) PC desktop on FreeBSD

D

Deicide4u

Hello, I would like to ask for an advice on installing FreeBSD on my very old PC. Not sure if this is the right subforum, but since I'm asking for hardware compatibility only, it will have to do for now.

So, here are the specs:
CPU: Intel Celeron D 356 (Cedarmill) (will "intel" driver work with this?)
RAM: 512 MB
dGPU: Nvidia Geforce4 MX 440 (what would be performance with generic "nv" driver? I saw that only nv supports this card on 11.1 RELEASE)
iGPU: SiS 660 (as a backup)
Network: should be supported, it's some rather old ethernet card. No Wi-Fi on this dinosaur, so no problems on that end.
Monitor: ThinkVision 1024x768 @60Hz

All input devices should be supported, of course.

The case has a DVD drive, 2 USB ports in the front and 4 in the back.
The only catch is that the cable for my monitor is missing, so I can't try it out right away. I can buy it, though. And this won't be urgent really, since I have a recent working laptop chugging Win10 along. So the purpose of this installation is trying out and learning FreeBSD for fun.

EDIT: This PC ran Debian Wheezy, Jessie and has Xubuntu 14.04 on it right now.
 
Deicide4u said:
Hello, I would like to ask for an advice on installing FreeBSD on my very old PC. Not sure if this is the right subforum, but since I'm asking for hardware compatibility only, it will have to do for now.

So, here are the specs:
CPU: Intel Celeron D 356 (Cedarmill) (will "intel" driver work with this?)
RAM: 512 MB
dGPU: Nvidia Geforce4 MX 440 (what would be performance with generic "nv" driver? I saw that only nv supports this card on 11.1 RELEASE)
Click to expand...

The Intel driver is for a graphics chip. You'll be using the Nvidia driver, and probably not the default nv driver, either. My nVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M takes the x11/nvidia-driver-340 driver. I'm not sure about yours.

Don't install the Intel and Nvidia driver too or it might default to the Intel driver and you'll be wondering why your screen is dragging/phasing when you move a window.

I speak from experience on that point. :p
 
Thank you for the reply. Indeed, "intel" driver is for graphics, so I would be using either "nv" or driver for sis card (if it supports SiS 660). The port for binary driver for my card is deleted, check:
http://www.freshports.org/x11/nvidia-driver-96

I'm not sure if x11/nvidia-driver-340 will work for Geforce4, that is most likely for new cards. That's why I'm asking about the "nv" performance. On my Wheezy install, I had to have the binary driver. Nouveau was too slow on linux 3.2. Guess we will have to wait and see.
 
Deicide4u said:
I'm not sure if x11/nvidia-driver-340 will work for Geforce4, that is most likely for new cards. That's why I'm asking about the "nv" performance. On my Wheezy install, I had to have the binary driver. Nouveau was too slow on linux 3.2. Guess we will have to wait and see.
Click to expand...

The box that uses the nVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M is 9 years old, still not as old as yours. It's the first Nvidia box I had to set up in years, and I believe that one ran the driver you mentioned as depreciated, so it was a different experience figuring it out than my Intel boxen which take the default drivers.

Your specs are similar to the first Gateway laptop I ran FreeBSD on. My only advise is to pick a lightweight Window Manager from those discussed and go from there.
 
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_32667.html suggests it is the 96 nvidia driver for your card. I note that the http://www.freshports.org/x11/nvidia-driver-96 you linked to isn't available as a package (pre-built) with FreeBSD 11.1 and wonder if its still included/supported?

I initially ran freebsd with the nvidia 8600GT that I have installed using nv and it worked really well. Later installing nvidia-driver-340 and I didn't notice any difference in performance, just had access via nvidia-settings to more configuration options that I don't personally use/change anyway.

When I installed OpenBSD it was very sluggish at moving windows around and wonder if that's due to what Trihexagonal highlighted i.e. perhaps the nvidia and onboard radeon on my setup where battling each other.
 
rufwoof said:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_32667.html suggests it is the 96 nvidia driver for your card. I note that the http://www.freshports.org/x11/nvidia-driver-96 you linked to isn't available as a package (pre-built) with FreeBSD 11.1 and wonder if its still included/supported?
Click to expand...
Not exactly. It has a known vulnerability and therefor gets skipped. The vulnerability is never going to be patched by NVidia. You can still build and install it but you're going to have to jump through a couple of hoops first.

Code: 
 FORBIDDEN: vulnerable to denial of service or arbitrary code execution (CVE-2014-8298)
 
FWIW, 512MB is very little memory if you intend to run this machine as your workstation, with a desktop environment (GNOME, KDE, Xfce). Also, using modern browsers (Firefox, Chromium, etc.) will require even more memory if you don't want to get annoyed by all the waiting (web pages aren't what they used to be). So if that is your use case, get more memory (if possible).
 
tingo said:
FWIW, 512MB is very little memory if you intend to run this machine as your workstation, with a desktop environment (GNOME, KDE, Xfce). Also, using modern browsers (Firefox, Chromium, etc.) will require even more memory if you don't want to get annoyed by all the waiting (web pages aren't what they used to be). So if that is your use case, get more memory (if possible).
Click to expand...
Barring the web browser situation, I managed to get FreeBSD + Xfce running on a Pentium III-based machine with a mere 192 MB of ram :). Memory stats listed me at 82 MB active, 33 MB wired when sitting at the desktop. Granted, not a LOT of room to work with, but 512 should be more or less fine for general use.

And, there's always NetSurf or text-based browsers (Lynx or Links) for low memory web browsing.
 
Zerker said:
And, there's always NetSurf or text-based browsers (Lynx or Links) for low memory web browsing.
Click to expand...
Yes, but very few people want to inflict that level of pain on themselves :-D
As I wrote, web pages today are very different from what they used to be. Not very many follows guidelines for best practices (TL;DR web pages should be readable with a text-only browser, and you should be able to navigate on them too) - those who do are the exception rather than the norm today.
For a small demo, turn off javascript in you browser of choice, and visit ten of your favorite web sites.
 
I did a bit of experimentation to satisfy my own curiosity using both NetSurf and Lynx. Both have generally similar capabilities as far as what type of web site they will support, and general usability ends up falling into a few categories.
  • eCommerce sites are generally unusable. I tried GOG, Best Buy and Amazon and couldn't really do much in any of them. Managed to sign into Amazon though, so that's something.
  • Most news sites and blogs are totally fine. I tried Ars Technica, Polygon and CBC
  • Most forums are also fine for reading, but topic listings can be a bit verbose. I had trouble posting this reply with Lynx, but NetSurf worked.
  • The FreeBSD handbook works, which is the primary use of a web browser when setting up BSD for the first time :)
It all depends on what you are looking to get out of the machine. Since Deicide4u just mentioned 'learning FreeBSD for fun', 512 MB is absolutely sufficient for that purpose.
 
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