The Caffeinated Penguin

Posted By matt on April 19, 2008

So, over the last few months, I've been poking different distros/OS's to see what they all know. Please note that these represent their state when I played with them, which may not be the state now. I have tried to include version numbers if I remember.

PCBSD 1.5

Did not handle my scroll wheel on my mouse initially, but then did after I applied updates.

DesktopBSD 1.6

Did not handle video/monitor correctly. Stuck me in 800×600. PCBSD got this, but why not DesktopBSD.

FreeBSD 7.0-RC1

Installed just fine, booted on that machine, and then throws a pile of DMA errors about the disk and finally gives up and dies.

Some overall thoughts on BSD-en

The ports system is nice, but I'm kind of ambivalent on this whole “automatic compile from source” deal. With precompiled binaries, you can actually regression test stuff and be a little more confident that your builds work. PCBSD does add a precompiled binary package system, where DesktopBSD just added a friendly easy to use frontend on the ports system. I kind of like the latter approach a little better.

However, I have a reasonable expectation that a modern distro can set up X correctly. If my hardware is supported by X, it should be set up to work automagically.

Nexenta Core Platform 1.0

This is an interesting concept – OpenSolaris wearing a Debian “hat”, specifically using apt to do package management. This, coupled with ZFS, adds some really nice features – namely Transactional ZFS Upgrades.

However, under the hood, it is still Solaris and, to be trite about it, /dev/sda1 is easier for me to remember than /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0…

Now, it is really unfortunate that Sun doesn't want to play nice with ZFS. I mean, it's nice of them to let Java come out and play, but I would like some ZFS too.

Ultimately, I think Ubuntu is where it is at right now, so I'm going to keep using that for right now..

Category: LJ Import
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