FreeBSD

I read about freeBSD a lot lastly. Many people had praised it.
Read their documentation, and found the idea impressive.

My primary Desktop is Yoper and more or less I am happy with its performance, but I feel the network speed is slow when I do apt-get update etc. (this might just be my feeling or yoper servers might be slow)

FreeBSD is famous for network performance, so I thought I should give it a try.

Downloaded bleeding edge version at present (5.3-beta6) and started the installation. Installation is straight forward if anybody who is installing for the first time spares some time to read the BSD disk-layout and partitioning information. It is little different than Linux.

While installing you have to give freeBSD a "Primary" partition with enough free space. freeBSD calls it a "slice". Then inside this "slice" freeBSD makes room for mount points /, var, tmp, usr and swap.

The / (root) mount point is called "a". So in first IDE disk in third primary partition (slice), freeBSD / will be : ad0s3a

If partitioning is understood rest of the installation is easy.

I faced some problems in writing to the disk, so I chose the safe-mode for booting the installation disk.

I found freeBSD very good. It is fast, responsive and very robust.
feeBSD gives you 2 options for adding packages
  1. Binary (pre-compiled) packages :pkg_add "package-name"
  2. Source compilation using ports: cd "port-directory";make install;make clean
I tried both methods. Everything went clean without a single error. All dependencies were resolved automatically. As I said, robust.

Now I wanted to do some configuration to suit my taste and problem started. I know Linux methods which are more or less are the same on all the Linux distros, but freeBSD is totally different OS.

I like freeBSD very much and wanted to make it my default desktop but as somebody said in a forum once "freeBSD is a nice system, but the benefit you get for migrating from Linux to freeBSD are worth the effort of learning a totally new system only if you have lots of free time".

:-( I don't have that much free time at present.

Yoper (Linux) stays as primary desktop.

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