Dear peers!
If it doesn't trouble you let me share my *first* experience with one
of the best unix Flavours - FreeBSD. A few months before, I received a copy of
FreeBSD-5.2.1 along with a magazine. I was really happy to see the cute little
Beastie - FreeBSD mascot. There were two iso-images (1 installation + 1 rescue)
in a DVD. I loop mounted the image on my linux box and went through the
installation guide. This was my first surprise - There were around 10 types of
installation listed. There was an option to install from a primary DOS
partition, which was the only option applicable for my box (I didn't wanna burn
the images on a CD). But to my dismay the 1GB partition was not enough size.
Then suddenly had a flash, yes my favourite toy qemu should be of some use, I
thought. Took a quick backup of mbrs & dbrs and launched qemu (qemu -hda
/dev/sda -cdrom <disk1.iso> -boot d). The installer was very nice and fast. It
seems that FreeBSD can be installed only on a primary partition; luckily I had
room for two primary partitions. FreeBSD is really nice here - It slices a
single partition in to many peaces and each of the slice acts like a separate
partition. It also suggested the aprox space required for each partition. I
happily formatted /dev/ad4s4[a-g] with ufs(native filesystem) and flagged off
to start installation. Installation was over in 15 mins, further answering the
installer took around 5 mins. Chose to have the loader on the dbr and rebooted
to load the FreeBSD kernel for the first time. I was really really happy - it
happily detected all my hardware (80GB SATA hdd, floppy driver, ide-dvd, ps/2
mouse/keyboard...). After all the bootup messages finally popped up the 80x25
term. Everything went fine until now but now started the trouble. the
keybindings were weirdy and my favourite vim didn't obey my orders, adding to
all this X (XFree86) would never start. I, for the first time, took the monitor
manual and found out the Horiz and vertical freq. X seemed to be
uncontrollable. also except for msdos I could not mount my other partitions
ext3 & reiser. and I finally decided to give up for now and sadly I laid BSD to
rest ;-(.
Sometime later, I thought of trying the latest version of XFree86 and
downloaded the ~30M files on my dialup (Took an entire night) only to forget
about it.
Three days leave for PONGAL... I was reading an article on NetBSD at
os.sourceforge.net and it inspired me to tame this daemon. Booted in to FreeBSD
and straightaway started the XFree86-4.4.0 installation. Voila! X started -
Luckily I had the 'via' driver in this version.
The desktops included in FreeBSD were.
* Gnome 2.4.1
* KDE 3.1.4
* FVWM
* TWM
along with -
* KOffice
* KDevelop
* Quanta plus
* Opera, mozilla, ...
I really wondered, if a single CD can contain these many tools. They were so
sweet and I especially love the gnome splash screen. I could even configure
ACME to use all of my multimedia keys. played with all those tools for some
time....
Accidently i came across a tool called 'vidcontrol'. This is used to setup the
video mode for the console. I liked the 80x30 mode with swiss font. Cool!!!
(Know any similar tool for linux??? possibly setfont)
longed for more... wanted to mount my reiser and ext3 partitions. reiserfs was
easy, googled reiserfs+FreeBSD and straight to the reiserfs port... compiled
reiserfs as a module and loaded (readonly-happy with it). google had nothing to
offer for ext3. Queued the task for some time later and had a look at the
FreeBSD manual. To my surprise it had a word on ext2 and said that it is
present in the source and by default not built in to the kernel. So wanted to
compile the kernel, little hope if it would ever compile, for I have not even
compiled a hello, world on BSD. OK, but let me try, I thought and followed the
instruction (Options EXT2FS) and started building the kernel. All the required
tools were installed by default. Compilation was going fine until it threw a
kernel exception. So what could be the reason? I restarted and found that the
disk was only 150MB free. thought it could be the reason and removed the ports
directory to free up some 250MB and restarted the build. Finally got a neat
build. installed the new kernel and to my delight ext3 partitions could be
mounted (readonly).
Loading and unloading the kernel modules are really very easy. Also automatic
loading at boot time is also easier than in linux. Downloaded a nice splash
image for the bootup screen. also, the console screen savers are cool!!!
Altogether it was a nice experience having had a chance to tame the great daddy
of OS'. What a way to celebrate ~//~PONGAL~\\~
So whats up this weekend??? Take a copy of FreeBSD and click install! Wanna
copy? mail me or call me to burn one
(http://www.chennailug.org/wiki/CDs_for_Grab).
--
Regards,
R. Vijairaj
Jai Jawan! Jai Kissan! Jai FSFn!