should I try a flavor of BSD ?

[Eddie Wilson]

If you try a BSD distro try PCBSD 1.4 I've also used 1.3 and 1.4 is a top notch os. I've had no problems with it at all. Just be sure to get your partitions correct.
Eddie

[Beau D.]

Shouldn't be too hard to do. IIRC PCbsd just make a swap partition and a big lump / then applies its magic. Follow the guided installand your in the free and clear.

Beau D.

[maybeway36]

If you need to use NDIS drivers for wireless, make sure you install the source from CD#2.

[ramjet_1953]

I have found the new release of PCBSD very good for my particular hardware config. The latest version is 1.4 and they have improved hardware detection dramatically.

I found the distrowatch download much faster than the PCBSD site.

Regards,
Roger

[motang]

I was wondering is trying a various flavor of BSD worth my time? I have seen FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, etc. and I was wondering if any of them are worth trying.

If you have a spare machine or the hard drive space then why not? Although I would suggest something like PC-BSD.

[TheS0urce1969]

PCBSD uses PBI which uses more space than using ports. You can use the ports package on PCBSD but it is not recommended mixing the two.
I don't understand the need for pbi, how hard is it to type "make clean install or pkg_add"? Desktopbsd uses GUI port manager which is very nice. Desktopbsd has a live cd since 1.6 I believe, and Freesbie is a only a live cd.

Btw you can install binaries or compile from source either way it is very easy. I only usually install for source when I have to.

[maybeway36]

How do you set up PC-BSD so pkg_add works?

[breakdaze]

I have just set up and installed OpenBSD on an old computer with an AMD K6-2 CPU, a super socket 7 VIA chipset motherboard, an ATI Radeon 9200 SE VGA card, a Netgear 10/100 Ethernet LAN card, and an old 20Gb HDD.

I must say I am very impressed. I am impressed at the excellent documentation, both on the OpenBSD web site, and the man pages loaded with the man page package at install.

The web site has an excellent FAQ that walked me through Installation. After installing, I read the afterboot man page and did a few minor tweaks. Finally, I used Google to look up my VGA card and monitor specs and configured X windows, once again using the excellent FAQ on the web site.

OpenBSD has a page that enumerates supported hardware and chips, so if you are running Linux, execute the command that enumerates your hardware (pciide?) and check it against the list.

With Ubuntu, I had trouble finding out how to make X windows fill my entire wide screen monitor with my old VGA card. It wasn't easy to find an answer using the man pages, forum, or wiki. But using the FAQ on the OpenBSD site I realized how to create a fresh xorg.conf and then exactly how to edit it.

The manual pages also are very good at referencing other man pages, and especially good at explaining what files to edit for configuration or tweaking.

However, OpenBSD isn't for people who want to run any drivers that have proprietary source code, or source code not available to the public. The reason is the developers don't want to deal with code they cannot fix, test, or trust to be secure.

In short, my install went very smoothly, but it would have been somewhat of a pain if I had picked a dual-boot system.

I would say it has excellent hardware support, but you may have to unplug and plug an optical USB mouse in to get it working, however this may be a symptom of my old motherboard's chipset with the USB 1.1 by VIA.

Finally, if you would like to learn "real" Unix steeped in tradition, with roots at Berkeley at Bell Labs, try a BSD flavor.

However, if you want to utilize the fancier aspects of your VGA card, or want to run a lot of other fancy software, perhaps it is not for you.

I personally think administering a system from the command line, reading manual pages, and perhaps printed books really helps with overall use and tweaking of any *NIX type OS in the long run.

For example, the hier command on OpenBSD told me things about the directory structure I never understood before.

YMMV