FreeBSD on a UEFI Laptop and other questions.

P

pritesh

Hi,

I recently got a Lenovo Z570 Laptop. I want to install and use FreeBSD on it. I did try PCBSD, but for some reason it appears that it does not recognize the UEFI system or may be I didnt install it correctly. Also, I would not want to use KDE. I was searching the net for a robust, rock solid stable OS and came across this intersting article - http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01.

After browsing through this article, I would really want to try out FreeBSD. But here are a couple of questions that I would be very thankful if someone could clarify:

1) How does FreeBSD 9 install on a laptop with UEFI based booting? Has anyone tried that?

2) I dont want KDE. I am fine with Gnome or any other DE for that matter...Does FreeBSD 9.0 ship with a DE or KDE is my only go? I did go through some threads and found that GhostBSD exists, but I really badly want to try out FreeBSD itself, hence the question. I am very happy with command line/terminal too as that was my first introduction to UNIX.

3) I want to play with Perl and Python. What version of Perl/Python is shipped with FreeBSD?

I am ready to invest the time required to learn FreeBSD, but just hoping that it gets installed on my laptop. My apologies in advance if any of my question appear to be asked without proper research. I have tried a lot of Linux Versions. They were really better about 2-3 years ago, but now they appear to be much bloated and quite frankly, the article above has really piqued my interest in FreeBSD.

Kindly help.
 
Combining very different questions into one post does not get the best results. But here goes:
1. Not me, don't know. UEFI may want a special partition layout.
2. No, FreeBSD does not include a GUI by default. It's up to the user to decide and install one. All the standard ones are in ports. Also, although PC-BSD uses KDE by default, it can be set for GNOME, xfce, or LXDE.
3. Four versions of Perl, from 5.8 to 5.14, are in ports. And six versions of Python, from 2.4 to 3.2.
 
Hi drhowarddrfine,

I don't think that's the issue.

Its working now! I did the following things and that set it right
  1. Installed Windows XP as my Windows 7 recovery DVDs were gone bad.
  2. Logged on to Lenovo's site and downloaded the latest patch for UEFI and installed it. System rebooted. But got error messages about Windows. so I
  3. Changed the SATA mode to Compatible. It was set to AHCI earlier. Booted again after saving these changes. Booted fine this time.
  4. Burned the FreeBSD DVD and once complete, installed it.
  5. This time, the system booted fine. It wouldn't give me an option for Windows XP, but I dont need it any ways ;)
  6. Browsed the net on how to go about installing software. I had gone through the DVD package list and found Gnome there so was pretty sure that there's got to be some way to install it off the DVD (Network connectivity as of now is a problem. I have a Tata Photon+ (HUAWEI USB Stick) connection but that's given by office so using it only for test purpose, can't browse too much using it. Found that I need to run the command sysinstall as root and then just followed it from there.
  7. Rebooted, no go, so browsed the net again and did some changes to rc.conf. Ran Xorg -configure, but still the GUI wouldnt come up. So looked through the file and found that Nvidia entry was creating problems. It was associated with Card 0. Removed that entry and made the subsequent entry referring to that in the "Screen" subsection as Card 1. Card 1 is Intel Graphics.
  8. Rebooted, and was able to login to Gnome. Feels much better than Linux because a) it's much faster b) suspend works properly, no crashes/error messages etc c) system somehow feels really rock solid.
Now I need to figure out how to get better and clear fonts (Tried subpixel smoothing, but that's not helping much), how to change screen brightness, get sound working.

But finally, I am on FreeBSD and it feels great!
 
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