Category Archive

The FreeBSD installation wasn’t quite painless… the lack of a graphical partitioning tool sent me running back to a Linux boot disk to make sure I didn’t hose my useful Linux Mint install. When setting up the partitions, the new filesystem names were alien to me :(. The install CD didn’t have the driver for my wireless card, so I had to plug in to do the FTP install.

From there the experience reminded me a lot of installing Gentoo, which I guess makes sense because Portage is based on BSD ports. I quickly installed Gnome and GDM and then fought with vim for quite some time. I toughed it out with csh and vi and got a basic install working, but my sound card is still not working, and I haven’t figured out what  BSD users do about Flash and whatnot… in any case I’m not really setting up a desktop workstation anyway but it’d still be nice to have my sound card working!

Really all I have to say is: it’s nice to be back in Linux! The experience of having something so familiar (Gnome) running on the alien BSD backend is one that makes me very uneasy. I’m sure it will get easier though, and I won’t pass judgement until I’ve given BSD a fair chance. Because different does not mean worse!