OJ said:
tryingagain said:
Well, if you managed to get Debian working, you most definitely are ready for FreeBSD :e
(What I mean is: I spent two days trying to get Debian 32, Debian 64, and Mint, even starting on my HTPC (trial box, but brand new non-exotic hardware). Then I had enough of it; they didn't even boot up, and since I am running a rock stable pfSense and have been deeply in love with FreeBSD ever since I first learned of it some years ago, I installed PC-BSD 9.2. Fourteen minutes, up and running, smiling at me with a 'hi, you there again?' :beergrin ).
That doesn't sound right and you know it. Debian is very solid, and if you had a problem it would be with some proprietary or closed source bits that you wanted. That's why one might want to use Mint, which I based on Ubuntu (fool proof), which in turn is based on Debian. It has all the bits you need for modern media. For various reasons, I have recently installed both. It didn't take very long, and absolutely nothing went wrong. Yes, things can get wonky. I've encountered problems too - everybody has. I suggest you may have had a bad burn or some fundamental thing. One has to be careful about generalizing. As for PC-BSD, I've installed that a number of times. It too goes in like the Linux systems. Very easy. So, we can at least agree on that.
To be honest: no, I don't know :e
My story is this: early '90s, there was this 'new thing', better than Windows 3.0/3.1. It was called 'Linux'. I tried many distributions back then. I managed to crash them all within one hour (no joke). I tried them for years (you know, back then there was a free CD with the monthly computer magazine - ah, those days
). Early 2000, I gave up, too much hassle. Install one package, and it breaks the next. A couple of years later, while working at a client, I accidentally walked into the wrong office. Sysadmins of that corporation sat there. They all had these weird looking GUI's on their screens. I asked them 'Linux??'. They laughed, and said: "No, serious stuff: Unix."
So I found
freebsd FreeBSD. In my early days I went with 'bare' FreeBSD (I think it was 4, or 5?). It took me one week just to have KDE installed :e But then again: for over a decade I managed to crash every new Linux distribution by simply going into the CLI and doing something as basic as
ls -l, or
apt-get install (as an example), and I managed to have broken something again. And then I met
FBSD FreeBSD: I could type in something and it would still simply continue to work
However: making it a real desktop was cumbersome. Then I discovered DesktopBSD. Unfortunately, the kind man who was behind that, 'Peter', had to abandon the project due to other interests. At the same time I also discovered PC-BSD, which wasn't as stable then as it appears to be now. So I went back to FreeBSD a couple of years later, to "try again". A great member of this fine forum has gone through great, great, efforts back then to help me get it to work, as it appeared I had a visit from Mr. Murphy (and his whole family :e ). Just when I got it to work a little bit I got a serious accident, which brought me into a coma and has kept me ill for years. Just recently, things have been going a little bit better, and so I decided to try and get rid of Windows once again.
My brother in law swears by Debian. From what I remember, Debian is sort of (IMHO) the most serious Linux, and if memory serves me correctly the Debian- and FreeBSD developers work together. Having memories of how cumbersome BSD on the desktop was for me, I decided to install Debian. On my new HTPC, which has an AMD A10-5700, a new Gigabyte
mobo motherboard, 16 GB RAM, and a WD Black harddisk. X64 installed, booted, I log in, nothing happens, I go get coffee, I come back, there is an "oops, something went wrong, please log out and log in again". That's all it said. Of course logging in again only gave the same problem. Fine, so Debian i386 then. I wrote it to the USB stick, installed, it appeared to be going ok, it finished installing, rebooted, and gave three pages of very strange lines (not even normal error messages, but just these lines full of numbers and [ 5 ] and kind of stuff). I was irritated by then. Fine, Mint then: I created new USB stick (Mint 16), it boots, the installer starts, I get through the first two or three pages, and Mint does similar to what Debian did: "there was an error, installer can't continue, press enter to reboot". No clue as to what the problem was, and there I was. After three distributions, I now had to go google on some vague problem?
By then I was extremely irritated. I created a USB stick with PC-BSD 9.2, installed it, and fourteen minutes later it was up and running and I was browsing using Iceweasel.
I have the same experience with pfSense, BTW: you put the USB stick in, and five minutes later it is installed and running.
So ever since the early nineties until this very day Linux has always been giving me problems, FreeBSD almost never gives me problems. That is why I donated to FreeBSD, pfSense and PC-BSD, and not to Linux (well, not quite true, I did donate to OpenElec, as that also just works).
So it might very well be my bad luck with Linux, but then again: I am not doing anything differently. Write either Linux or FreeBSD to a USB stick, and try to install it.
