Last week, FreeBSD 7 was released. I decided to download and install it on my laptop. The last time I tried FreeBSD was when it was still 5.3. Back then, somehow I ended up with a damaged hard drive and decided that FreeBSD does not like cheap hardware. So I went back to Linux.

I had been watching FreeBSD 7 for months and was excited by the fact that in addition to officially including the wpi driver, the Intel Wi-Fi firmware will also be included with this release. That meant that the Wi-Fi card on my laptop would now be officially supported by FreeBSD. In addition, I was anxious to try out the ULE scheduler. I was also pretty much excited about the improved SMP scalability which the pre-release docs boasted as having “peak performance improvements as high as 350% over FreeBSD 6.X under normal loads and 1500% at high loads. When compared with the best performing Linux kernel (2.6.22 or 2.6.24) performance is 15% better”.

I spent a couple of days downloading, installing, and setting it up on the laptop until I got to the point where I had XFCE4 installed and I could browse the web using Firefox. I was pleased that the install went on smoothly and I was able to set up my wireless network connection with very little effort. I was also able to set it up so that it dual-booted into Windows XP just as it was when I had Fedora Core 8 on it. There are some things that I didn’t like with the default install and a few things that made sense.

(more…)