About a year ago I tried to install 14.1 on two different computers I had lying around here, and I eventually gave up after hitting too many obstacles. However, this past weekend I was bored, so I decided to download the latest verion and give it a shot by installing it onto a bare harddrive I had sitting around on the shelf.
I think that from the time I started until the time I finished was less than two or three hours, compared to the endless hours during my last attempt. I was able to get all of my peripheral equipment working, with the exception of my Logitech webcam, which doesn't seem to want to work no matter what. However, unlike last year, my printer and scanner seem to be working just fine without any trouble.
Also, I'm posting this because I think that some of what I experienced might be useful to other newbies who are thinking about giving BSD a try. During my attempt last year, I came up with the bright idea of trying to create my own partitioning scheme, and that didn't always workout so well. However, during my recent attempt this past weekend, I simply agreed to accept the default partitioning the installation was recommending to me, and things seemed to go awhole lot smoother.
The other thing that I noticed this past weekend was that Xfce would sometimes do strange things after rebooting, such as only showing the wallpaper, but no taskbar and desktop icons. But after a little bit of expermintation, I think that the problem was being caused by the wallpaper image which I was trying to use. I was using an old image from Microsoft XP, and I had it set to Tile, and it seemed that Xfce would run into trouble right at the moment it was trying set the wallpaper into tile mode, and then it would freeze, or do something else. However, after I did away with the troublesome jpeg picture as my wallpaper, Xfce has successfully loaded over and over again.
As I mentioned earlier, the only problem I have now is my webcam not working, and plan for that is to follow the handwritten instructions I have in reverse, uninstalling all the packages I installed for the camera, and removing commenting out the lines I added to certain conf files, and then start over again, this time paying more attention to what I'm doing as I move forward.
I think that from the time I started until the time I finished was less than two or three hours, compared to the endless hours during my last attempt. I was able to get all of my peripheral equipment working, with the exception of my Logitech webcam, which doesn't seem to want to work no matter what. However, unlike last year, my printer and scanner seem to be working just fine without any trouble.
Also, I'm posting this because I think that some of what I experienced might be useful to other newbies who are thinking about giving BSD a try. During my attempt last year, I came up with the bright idea of trying to create my own partitioning scheme, and that didn't always workout so well. However, during my recent attempt this past weekend, I simply agreed to accept the default partitioning the installation was recommending to me, and things seemed to go awhole lot smoother.
The other thing that I noticed this past weekend was that Xfce would sometimes do strange things after rebooting, such as only showing the wallpaper, but no taskbar and desktop icons. But after a little bit of expermintation, I think that the problem was being caused by the wallpaper image which I was trying to use. I was using an old image from Microsoft XP, and I had it set to Tile, and it seemed that Xfce would run into trouble right at the moment it was trying set the wallpaper into tile mode, and then it would freeze, or do something else. However, after I did away with the troublesome jpeg picture as my wallpaper, Xfce has successfully loaded over and over again.
As I mentioned earlier, the only problem I have now is my webcam not working, and plan for that is to follow the handwritten instructions I have in reverse, uninstalling all the packages I installed for the camera, and removing commenting out the lines I added to certain conf files, and then start over again, this time paying more attention to what I'm doing as I move forward.
But mainly only seen odd things with the wallpaper (happens on Linux too so maybe more X11/Xfce related):
(I usually use external HDMI and Solid background)