FreeBSD and TrueOS

M

msbic

Good day all,

I decided to install FreeBSD 10.1 on an old machine I have (a Dell workstation with a dual core Pentium D, 2 GB of RAM, 500 GB drive). The main purpose is light file serving (for now at least). My first attempt to install it failed because the installer (mini x64 USB stick image) failed to extract the downloaded files. I then downloaded a TrueOS ISO image and installed it successfully.

I had in the past installed and used FreeBSD (not an expert by any means), and I am used to certain ways of doing things, hence some things with TrueOS caught me by surprise.
  1. ZFS is used by default, I am not sure whether it's a good or a bad thing for a machine with 2 GB of RAM and a single 500 GB drive
  2. vi is linked to vim and vim wasn't present on the system, had to use nano
  3. I noticed that php and nginx were installed by default.
My questions to those who use / have used both:
  • Can I do with TrueOS anything I can do with FreeBSD?
  • Any other caveats I should be aware of?
Thanks in advance,
Michael
 
Short answer is not. For starters TrueOS can't be installed on UFS as you discovered which is limiting factor for older hardware. Furthermore it only supports amd64 architecture unlike FreeBSD. As ARM architecture spreads to a general server market that might become serious limitation. That being said many people who use FreeBSD as a data storage OS, myself included find running TrueOS or even FreeNAS in production more convenient than vanilla FreeBSD. One case is exception. If you need a hardware RAID you need vanilla FreeBSD as ZFS is not suitable file system on the hardware RAID. I have such installations in my lab. Besides being somewhat pre-configured TrueOS comes with a really nice jail management tool called Warden. However you can use sysutils/pcbsd-utils to install Warden on vanilla FreeBSD.

Linking vi to vim is a bug. Try typing nvi and you will get traditional BSD version of vi. Upgrade form 10.0 to 10.1 was also buggy. IIRC you can chose virtual host installation option of TrueOS where you get pre-compiled version of VirtualBox. I am not using it. TrueOS has a really nice root on ZFS installer.

Unfortunately looking at your hardware spec you should stay away from TrueOS and ZFS in general.
 
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