Back to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD
Hi everyone!
I had used Debian GNU/kFreeBSD some years back, but it didnt really work that
good and I gave up on it. After having switched completey to FreeBSD as my
Desktop/Notebook/Server-OS the last years I thought I would give it a chance
again!
First impression: WOW! It works :D
No seriously I was really surprised by all the things working out-of-the-box.
Now of course I had much more low-level FreeBSD-experience now so I new which
kernel-moduls to load and all of that, but the system is quite useable beit
not as polished as the Linux-Version of Debian of course.
But I'll not bore you with world view, here are the facts: ( I hope reporting
these facts helps someone)
What works (my current setup):
- running kfreebsd-7-686-smp
- running xorg, with a lite kde-desktop (kdebase, konqueror, kmail, yakuake,
kmplayer)
- networking, sound (although arts keeps crashing)
Issues I got resolved:
- had to disable Softupdates on root partition, because that currupted the fs
on every shutdown (softupdates werent default for / so this isnt critical)
Open Issues (thanks fopr any help on these in advance):
- my usb-mouse isnt recognized. It works in FreeBSD7 but GNU/kFreeBSD only
recognizes:
uhid0: <Logitech USB Gaming Mouse, class 0/0, rev 2.00/46.00, addr 2> on uhub2
uhid1: <Logitech USB Gaming Mouse, class 0/0, rev 2.00/46.00, addr 2> on uhub2
Did you remove any usb-related modules from the kernel?
- dri doesnt work. Apperently libgl1-mesa-dri for kfreebsd doesnt contain
i915_dri.so . Why? What could I do about it?
As a side-project I'd like to compare 3D-Performance of FreeBSD, GNU/Linux and
GNU/kFreeBSD to check some of the performance-myths floating around in the
net.
- nfs actually works (great!), but only when manually calling mount_nfs. Doing
mount -t nfs -a results in no mounts and just calling mount on a mount-point
specified in fstab results in "unknown filesystem type"
- geli seems not to be available. Geli would be really great to have since its
one of freebsd's superior features (at least IMHO). And it would give me the
possibility to mount my other freebsd-partitions ;-) . The kernel-modul for
geli works and is shipped, so I guess its only the userland part that isnt
ported...
Concerning Packages:
Altogether really many(!) packages seem to work fine. I got most of what I
usually need running and that is impressive ;) I even have stuff that I
couldnt get working under native FreeBSD like GCJ/GIJ working as
dropin-replacement for java (on the FreeBSD-side unfortunately not everyone
is that free-software-enthusiastic so less time is spent on things like
that).
Some packages of course dont work yet, so I'd like to know what the overall
plan is concerning packages. Should I report broken packages? Is there a way
to debug pkg-breakages? Do they occur randomly or is it mostly some
well-known not-working pkgs that cause trouble, because a lot of other stuff
depends on them? How can one help?
Also it would be great to know if there is some central spot for information.
Things like a road-map, overview of which bsd-tools are kept, which ones are
already or will be replaced my gnutools and why / why not. Also the default
kernel-config (differences to GENERIC) used by Debian would be interesting.
....ok enough questions for the first email :)
Greetings
Hannes
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