Stop Microsoft
Operating Systems => Linux and UNIX => Topic started by: toadlife on 19 December 2005, 12:27
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So I have this old Athlon 1GZ box with 384 RAM and a 40Gb hard drive that's been sitting at my mom's house for ages. The power supply died on it about a year ago, and she used a laptop from work, so she didn't care about getting it fixed. I recently bought a new case, so I had an extra PS and offered to put it in her PC.
Just for kicks, I installed PCBSD 1.0-rc1 on the machine to see how far it has progressed. It's pretty good - though there are a few things I would change. The installer was all graphical and everything installed with minimal input. It's based on FreeBSD 6.0 and starts up with a graphical login to KDE 3.4.3. You install software on it at PCBSD.ORG via a custom package system where you download a package file, double click on it, and you're done. It also has an auto-update systems that download and install both OS and package updates.
A couple of stupid issues so far...
* K3B requires root password to run. It can and should be made to run as non-root by default. Damn the security issues!
* The default regular user is allowed to su to root, but any users you create afterward with their built in user manager can't. The built in user manager does not give you an option to change this.
* The setup program set up my monitor with a max resolution of 1024x768. It's a 19" screen, and can go to 1600x1200. I would have to edit my Xorg config manually to change this.
All of these issues, *I* know how to fix, but the average Joe trying out a non windows OS for the first time would be out of luck.
You guys should give it a whirl.
There is also another Desktop FreeBSD disro called desktopBSD which I might try too.
http://pcbsd.org (http://pcbsd.org)
http://desktopbsd.net (http://desktopbsd.net)
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How does it compare with some of nube Linux distro's as far as ease of use and power?
I hope that the BSD community will decide on a standard package format if binary disrtibution is going to become the norm - they don't want to end up in the same mess as Linux.
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How does it compare with some of nube Linux distro's as far as ease of use and power?
I hope that the BSD community will decide on a standard package format if binary disrtibution is going to become the norm - they don't want to end up in the same mess as Linux.
I wouldn't know - I havn't used linux in a couple of years. It's ten times easier than FreeBSD though!
Judging by what I've read about the n00bish linux distros today, I would guess that it doesn't even compare, the reason being that this is a fairly new phenomenon (The drive to make an easy Desktop BSD) and there has not yet a been large body of work put into making BSD easy. The little problems I ran into seem like they would be fairly easy to fix though.
It's a very good start though, and if they get some more developers that can invest some time in the custom KDE apps (like the PCBSD admin/update tools), I think it could be really great.
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I gotta to agree with you...
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I'm gonna try this in VMware. I'll get back to you with the results later.
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Ok, I wasn't able to do very much because I ran out of HD space. :( However, I browsed through the desktop, and was able to try one of those PBI files.
The verdict? Brilliance. I did run into the same resoltion problem as toadlife (except with 800x600 max, because I chose that for the installer), and upon installing Opera it didn't recognize any but a few ugly fonts that made me download Firefox (upon which I ran out of space).
But this is great stuff. I should try it on a real computer sometime.
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Wow. I installed "update3" for Rc1 and the mouse stopped working! That's one nasty bug!
If anyone decides to try this, you should look at this thread (http://www.pcbsd.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2328) . I posted a 'fix' the bug.
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What are the minimum system requirements?
Is BSD lighter/heavier than Linux?
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What are the minimum system requirements?
Is BSD lighter/heavier than Linux?
I would assume, seeing as how Linux is just a kernel. But once again, it all depends. You can't really compare it as a whole, just because it depends on the purpose of the distro. One of those single floppy distros would be small, obviously, but the newbie friendly distros would be pretty heavy, with all that GUI crap. Something like Debian would be in the middle. Though I've got a really old PII-300 just waiting for an OS. This sounds a bit heavy, but I think I'll try FreeBSD.
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I wouldn't think there'd be a huge difference performance wise. They both (FreeBSD and GNU/Linux) have excellent kernels, with excellent memory management (I think FreeBSD actually has better memory management than Linux, but only for rarely used stuff that the Linux dev's have yet to bother copying (and it kicks ass that they can copy, from eachother (i.e. share)). That's according to a guy on ##freebsd on freenode, and it's likely not the whole story) and excellent pre-emption stuff (although, I believe Linux to be better there (pre-empting system calls, or something), but I dunno, and I don't think it'd matter too-much overall). Then, they'd be running (mostly) the same user-mode applications and desktop enviornments. So I doubt there'd be a huge difference between the two.
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Hmm, the update3 didn't break my mouse. But then again, I didn't reboot after installing. Was that what does it?
As for system requirements, the website says:
Pentium 2 300MHz
128MB RAM
4GB hard drive space (my test showed it to use under 2GB to install, actually)
Not far away from what most Linux distros claim...or XP claims, for that matter. My testing machine was a VMware machine with a P4 2.8GHz (not including overhead), 160MB RAM, and 2.5GB hard drive (that filled up within 20 minutes because I didn't actually have that much space available). Very fast.
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update3 only breaks usb mice....and you have to reboot for it to happen. So if you have a usb mouse and you install the update and reboot your have to do the little fix I posted in that thread. It's not hard.
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Ah, ok...I have a PS/2 mouse anyway.
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Ive got some new ram for my 486 (2x 8MB 72Pin SIMM) to replace the damaged 16MB SIMM, HDD and CDROM are SCSI - im gonna install slack 4.0 on it once the new ram is here
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Ive got some new ram for my 486 (2x 8MB 72Pin SIMM) to replace the damaged 16MB SIMM, HDD and CDROM are SCSI - im gonna install slack 4.0 on it once the new ram is here
This is on topic...how?
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oops, read a post higher up and thought this was a thread on getting old hardware up (never post at 5am)
btw, THE NEW RAM IS DEAD!!! :mad:
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I hope you haven't tried to fit your RAM at 5am. :eek:
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no, i got it today and fitted it just before that post.
/me kills whoever on ebay sold the ram
and now im waiting for some more simm to be delivered :\
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BTW, I made a PBI for PCBSD. It integrates Firefox and Thunderbird so they use eachother when links are clicked.
http://www.pcbsd.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2359
In Linux distros do Firefox and Thunderbird normally use eachother?
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The one thing that pisses me off with UNIX systems is how programs don't interoperate or communicate with each other very well and there's no standard way to have a default browser or mail client unlike Mac OS or Windows.
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The one thing that pisses me off with UNIX systems is how programs don't interoperate or communicate with each other very well and there's no standard way to have a default browser or mail client unlike Mac OS or Windows.
GNOME can do that, and I think KDE can too. "Desktop > Preferences > Preferred Applications" in GNOME.
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GNOME can do that, and I think KDE can too. "Desktop > Preferences > Preferred Applications" in GNOME.
It doesn't work for applications which are not written specifically to use that feature. Setting your default email and web clients to thunderbird and mozilla in KDE does nothing. I don't know about Gnome, but I'm willing to bet the same is true.
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Setting your default email and web clients to thunderbird and mozilla in KDE does nothing.
Definetly something wrong there.
I can click on a link in GAIM and it opens in firefox. Changing the default browser to "blahblah" in GNOME's preferred applications causes an error when I click a link in GAIM. Clicking URLs in kspread launches Konqueror, as expected.
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Definetly something wrong there.
I can click on a link in GAIM and it opens in firefox. Changing the default browser to "blahblah" in GNOME's preferred applications causes an error when I click a link in GAIM. Clicking URLs in kspread launches Konqueror, as expected.
I'm unclear on what you meant here. Are you saying things work like they should for you, or they don't work like they should?
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I'm unclear on what you meant here. Are you saying things work like they should for you, or they don't work like they should?
Things work like they were intended to. Applications will chose to ask GNOME or KDE or whatever or nothing for a browser or mail client or terminal to run.
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Things work like they were intended to. Applications will chose to ask GNOME or KDE or whatever or nothing for a browser or mail client or terminal to run.
Ok. That's what I thought. It actually should work as long as the application that the link is being called from supports konquerors dfault app settings.
Try setting firefox to your default brower and then clicking a link from an email in thunderbird or setting thunderbird as your default mail client and clicking a "mailto" link in firefox. Does it work then?
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Try setting firefox to your default brower and then clicking a link from an email in thunderbird or setting thunderbird as your default mail client and clicking a "mailto" link in firefox. Does it work then?
Better off asking someone else, I don't use/have thunderbird (I use a web app in the form of Gmail for my email).
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GNOME can do that, and I think KDE can too. "Desktop > Preferences > Preferred Applications" in GNOME.
But If I set up KDE to use FireFox as the default html viewer the setting only affects KDE, Gnome, Xfce are all unaffected, hence there's no standard way to set a default application for a particular purpose, the same applies to drag and drop, DDE and OLE across on any UNIX platform, Windows and Mac OS are better in this respect.
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But If I set up KDE to use FireFox as the default html viewer the setting only affects KDE, Gnome, Xfce are all unaffected, hence there's no standard way to set a default application for a particular purpose, the same applies to drag and drop, DDE and OLE across on any UNIX platform, Windows and Mac OS are better in this respect.
Well there is a standard - the problem is, they are "KDE standards" and "Gnome standards", not "X" or "linux/unix" standards. and many apps just don't bother to impliment all of the standards.
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That's what exactly what I meant, the same applies to package management.
I think the problem is that things like package management, DDE and desktops weren't part of the origional POSIX standard, they came along afterwards.
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the same applies to drag and drop
Nope it doesn't:
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards
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That's what exactly what I meant, the same applies to package management.
I think the problem is that things like package management, DDE and desktops weren't part of the origional POSIX standard, they came along afterwards.
Package management won't ever be standardized, at least I hope so. The reason there are so many packaging formats (RPM, autopackage, dep, Slackware tarballs (the simplest of all) etc...) is that different people found different perfect ways to do the job of a packaging format. Same goes for everything else, except things like clipboarding and drag and drop don't usually have many differences, so they're easy to standardize without leaving anything out.
EDIT: stuff like preferred applications don't usually differ much either, which is why I hope in a while KDE and GNOME and XFCE, plus more, ask for the preferred browser/mail client/terminal from the same places.
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It's a start a I suppose and I'm glad they're slowly working towards desktop standardisation and I hope that one day the same will apply to OLE and package management etc.
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Yeah when I first tried linux in 1997 (Slackware 96 I beleive), I loaded up XFree86, fucked around for hours trying to get my damn mouse to work, fucked around for more hours trying to get my monitors resolution right, fucked around even more hours trying to get an good window manager working (fvwm95), fucked around for more hours getting my dialup working, installed an email client and web browser and some other apps like emacs - only to find that copying a pasting didn't work accross *any* of the programs I installed.
But in the last few years, I've never seen it not work.
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I, personally, have seen an issue between Kopete and Konqueror when it came to cut and pasting and having someone recieve said paste on their cellphones... I haven't had this problem with Gnome using Epiphany and Gaim. I think Gnome probably uses a more standardized ascii key format... as anything I would type in Kopete could be read by the cell phone user but not the paste. I also find that GTK is better when it comes to drag and drop operations.