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.

/usr/home Makes Total Sense

When I was partitioning, sorry, slicing up the hard disk to make room for the system I ended up taking the lazy route and tried the “auto” option which automatically set up mount points for /, /var, /usr and some swap. I was a bit surprised as to why / was only given 512MB by the partitioner. I mean, what about /home? I decided to play along and went with the install anyway.

When the install was finished, I found that /home was a symlink into /usr/home. Putting home under /usr makes total sense because after all that mount point is where “user” files should be put into.

Flash 9? Nein!

This is not really FreeBSD’s fault. But at least they’re trying to provide some support for it via Linux emulation. I’ve tried several tutorials and eventually resorting to dropping down to Flash 7 but I had no luck getting it to work.

Sound Seems To Work

I got my sound card to work using the Intel HDA drivers and I had to go through far fewer hoops to install MP3 support in XFCE Media player. The “Use open formats” crap on Fedora is a nice gesture at best but some of us just want to listen to our MP3’s and don’t want to be bothered with converting it to Ogg Vorbis!

Ports Needs To Grow Up

DPKG is the sole reason why I like Debian and its spin-offs like Ubuntu. They have package building, automatic build-time dependency resolution, and package management down to an art. Suffice to say, it’s beautiful. Ports is, well, “ports”. It has its strong points, none of which really matter in the grand scheme of things. Ports needs to be more like a combination of Gentoo Portage and DPKG. make is not cut out to be a package management tool.

DPKG has this lovely feature that figures out the run-time dependencies at build time (right before your package gets wrapped up into a .deb). This frees the package maintainer from having to maintain a list of run-time dependencies (because end-users normally don’t have time to figure out these things for themselves). Portage has the right idea with USE flags all documented and package masking.

Wi-Fi in Slo-Mo

I noticed was that my Wi-Fi link was a bit slow. I’m on a 384Kbps connection and I should be getting 40Kbps downstream. I was only getting around 7-9KBps under FreeBSD. At first I thought it was all just something that had to do with my ISP. I rebooted into Windows XP and when I tried it from there, I was able to download at full speed (~40Kbps). I tried fiddling with the sysctl settings for networking as found on numerous guides on the ‘Net. I’ve tried raising the I/O buffers but it did not seem to help with horribly slow downloads. Increasing the sendspace and recvspace did not help either.

How am I supposed to upload my important work at 7KBps??? I might as well just go back to dial-up. I can’t figure out why it’s slow as molasses on a cold day and I tried all of the tweaks suggested by numerous forums and mailing list postings. Nothing helped. I chalked this one up to “Wi-Fi driver not mature enough”.

Please Beastie, Don’t Destroy My Cheap Laptop!

The last straw that forced me to remove FreeBSD and replace it with ArchLinux was when I restarted and suddenly heard my speaker emit a high pitched squeal. I had never had that happen before and it was reminiscent of the “clickity-click of death” that killed my (back then newly bought) hard drive when I was fiddling around with FreeBSD 5. Fortunately, I was able to replace the hard drive as it was still under warranty. When I tried it again after a full reinstall of FreeBSD 5, sure enough the hard disk started clicking after some time and I was forced to yank out the power plug before it could destroy another disk.

The speaker squealing on reboot was not a good sign. I know my laptop is a cheap piece of crap but I spent good money on that thing and I was not about to let an OS kill it. Oh well, back to Linux.

Sorry FreeBSD, you just need to grow up some more to be able to replace Linux on my laptop. There’s always room for you on my NAS though.

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