Getting back into FreeBSD

L

logicassassin

Hi, new to the site and have a couple of questions regarding freebsd.

I was a 4.x/5.x user for a good while (bought 4.0 retail so I coul dget the printed manual). It took me forever to get off of 4.x and move to 5.x because 4.x was stable enough. Eventually I stopped using FreeBSD in favor of Linux, mainly because of the hassle of setting up a triple boot machine (Win32, Linux, FreeBSD) coupled with my increasing laziness.

I'm going to get back into it, but I have a few concerns.

1. Has FreeBSD's resource requirements increased much over time? I have no doubt that my primary machine can handle it (P4-3GHz HT Northwood core, HT turned on and 2GB RAM), but my laptop is another story. The laptop in question is an IBM Thinkpad 570e w/P3-500MHz and 320MB RAM. How well will it work on something like that? Most mainstream Linux distros run pretty badly on the laptop with KDE or Gnome as the desktop, but switching to Enlightenment or Fluxbox gets it useable (I would likely be using Enlightnement DR16 under FreeBSD like I used to).

2. My primary machine is also my DAW, so I'm using an M-Audio Audiophile 192 audio card in it. Once upon a time in Linux land, this was unsupported or badly supported, requiring me to turn on my on-board audio in order to get sound while under linux. That's changed in the last couple of years (pulseaudio is giving me fits though). I noticed that there's OSS support for my card, but I'm wondering if anyone here has any experience with using the same card under FreeBSD.

3. Nvidia video cards - How well does the Nvidia driver work under FreeBSD?

Thanks for the help.
 
logicassassin said:
Hi, new to the site and have a couple of questions regarding freebsd.

I was a 4.x/5.x user for a good while (bought 4.0 retail so I coul dget the printed manual). It took me forever to get off of 4.x and move to 5.x because 4.x was stable enough. Eventually I stopped using FreeBSD in favor of Linux, mainly because of the hassle of setting up a triple boot machine (Win32, Linux, FreeBSD) coupled with my increasing laziness.

I'm going to get back into it, but I have a few concerns.

1. Has FreeBSD's resource requirements increased much over time? I have no doubt that my primary machine can handle it (P4-3GHz HT Northwood core, HT turned on and 2GB RAM), but my laptop is another story. The laptop in question is an IBM Thinkpad 570e w/P3-500MHz and 320MB RAM. How well will it work on something like that? Most mainstream Linux distros run pretty badly on the laptop with KDE or Gnome as the desktop, but switching to Enlightenment or Fluxbox gets it useable (I would likely be using Enlightnement DR16 under FreeBSD like I used to).

2. My primary machine is also my DAW, so I'm using an M-Audio Audiophile 192 audio card in it. Once upon a time in Linux land, this was unsupported or badly supported, requiring me to turn on my on-board audio in order to get sound while under linux. That's changed in the last couple of years (pulseaudio is giving me fits though). I noticed that there's OSS support for my card, but I'm wondering if anyone here has any experience with using the same card under FreeBSD.

3. Nvidia video cards - How well does the Nvidia driver work under FreeBSD?

Thanks for the help.
Click to expand...

Welcome back! I started with 4.x, skipped 5, and have been onto 6 and now 7. I love it now more than ever. And I think you'll find it is familiar, yet better.

As to #1, I don't know specifics, but I would say you're fine on the machine. I use minimal WMs by preference, so I don't really worry about those hogging up too many resources. I won't suggest a particular lightweight WM, but there are several out there that work well.

I don't know about the hardware specific questions, but checking the hardware compatibility list is always a good start. I think video card driver support has improved, but I am not super knowledgable about this area.

Cheers,
 
1) I have FreeBSD 7 running on P3 laptop with 256MB or memory using OpenBox for a WM, so it is usuable as long as your stay away from the 3rd party resource hogs.

2) I'm pretty sure the M-Audio 192 works with 7, I've seen posts on it in the past. But you may want to look at FreeBSD 8 as it has a redesigned sound system that includes such goodies as a parametric EQ.

3)The Nvidia driver work fine. I've been using them since they were first released. You just have to remember to use the right version for you card. There are a few versions in the ports to support the legacy cards and such.

And Welcome Back....
 
another question:

One of the more irritating thins I remember was the bootloader's insistence to exist. Basically, I had installed XP, Mandrake Linux, and then FreeBSD. I wanted to use LILO as my bootloader, but nothing I did short of nuking the MBR could get boot0 out of there. Once gone, I had to use a boot floppy to get back into linux to re-run lilo.

Will something like this be the case again?
 
If you install the FreeBSD bootmanager. Yes. It's really a matter of personal taste. I think. For myself I don't care what bootloader I have on my machine. All I want is to boot up my os's.
 
A while ago I took an old FreeBSD 4.x Pentium 3 system and installed FreeBSD 7.1 onto it from scratch. It was noticeably faster. (mainly the file system I think)

I recommend going with 8.0.
 
logicassassin said:
another question:

One of the more irritating thins I remember was the bootloader's insistence to exist. Basically, I had installed XP, Mandrake Linux, and then FreeBSD. I wanted to use LILO as my bootloader, but nothing I did short of nuking the MBR could get boot0 out of there. Once gone, I had to use a boot floppy to get back into linux to re-run lilo.

Will something like this be the case again?
Click to expand...

Hello
Personnaly , each bootloader from each OS is installed on it own partion , then i use GAG on MBR to launch each OS
See it here for GAG : http://gag.sourceforge.net/
 
logicassassin said:
1. Has FreeBSD's resource requirements increased much over time? I have no doubt that my primary machine can handle it (P4-3GHz HT Northwood core, HT turned on and 2GB RAM), but my laptop is another story.
Click to expand...
Should work very well on that.

logicassassin said:
The laptop in question is an IBM Thinkpad 570e w/P3-500MHz and 320MB RAM. How well will it work on something like that? Most mainstream Linux distros run pretty badly on the laptop with KDE or Gnome as the desktop, but switching to Enlightenment or Fluxbox gets it useable (I would likely be using Enlightnement DR16 under FreeBSD like I used to).
Click to expand...
I used FreeBSD with Fluxbox on Dell C600 laptop with 850MHz CPU and 256Mb RAM and I could everything I wanted, Opera for Internet, GIMP for image editing, nautilus for files/thumbnails, no problems generally.

Samo for my older box with AMD K6-2 500MHz with 192MB RAM, no problems.

logicassassin said:
3. Nvidia video cards - How well does the Nvidia driver work under FreeBSD?
Click to expand...
Will work without a problem, as others stated, you just need to get the right version.

logicassassin said:
One of the more irritating thins I remember was the bootloader's insistence to exist. Basically, I had installed XP, Mandrake Linux, and then FreeBSD. I wanted to use LILO as my bootloader, but nothing I did short of nuking the MBR could get boot0 out of there. Once gone, I had to use a boot floppy to get back into linux to re-run lilo.

Will something like this be the case again?
Click to expand...
At FreeBSD installer you choose what to do with MBR, you can leave it untouched and boot FreeBSD by LILO or by GRUB (or other bootloader).
 
1. Has FreeBSD's resource requirements increased much over time?
Click to expand...

Actually, freeBSD even got faster, i also started on 4.x, switched to 5.4, stayed there until 7.0. Base 7.2-RELEASE install is faster than previous releases.

I ran 7.0 on Pentium 200MMX with 96 MB of RAM, it was pretty ok when using FVWM2.

2. My primary machine is also my DAW, so I'm using an M-Audio Audiophile 192 audio card in it
Click to expand...

snd_envy24ht kernel module
 
Has FreeBSD's resource requirements increased much over time?
Click to expand...
No, I've been using since 3.x days and it is getting better and better everyday. Right now I'm using 8RC3 and it works like a charm. However, most of servers are powered by 7.x series.

During first .com bubble FreeBSD 4 was the # 1 choice of ISPs and WHCs. It was fun.. �jr
 
cool.

I have 7.2 downloading at home now. and it'll probably be up and running this weekend.

One other question: How well does it run in VMWare Server (or do any of you have experience running it in Server)? One of the end goals is to have a small virtualized server farm running from my #2 box (2GHz P4 Northwood w/1GB RAM). Just some stuff to dink around with.
 
I don't think anybody has asked, but are we talking about the AMD64 or i386 architecture? Because if it's the AMD64, nVidia drivers aren't here just yet, but it looks like we should be in the home stretch for a beta. At this point, the last news there is that the changes seem to have worked.

Requirements wise, I just installed FreeBSD 8.0-RC3 onto my eee pc 900 and even at 900mhz with half the ram dedicated to the onboard video, I'm still not having much trouble with performance.
 
Runs well in VMWare Server 2.x (use the open-vm-tools port for guest additions).

Runs well in VirtualBox 3.x. Runs better on systems with hardware virtualisation.

Runs well in KVM. Requires hardware virtualisation support.

Runs well in Xen. Requires hardware virtualisation support.

IOW, runs well pretty much everywhere. :)
 
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