Adam Wilson wrote:
> I don't even think I'll need ZFS.
Though once you've tried it, the snapshots feature especially, you might
never want to use anything else!
> What filesystems does GNU/kFreeBSD
> support? In the installation videos/screenshots I have seen there were
> options for UFS, FAT, and nothing else. The filesystem front was a bit
> limited. Is UFS decent? Is it the BSD equivalent of ext2?
UFS resembles ext2, although there is a faster, journalled mode more
like ext3/4. If you create separate partitions for /usr, /home, etc.
then journalling is enabled for all except / (where it doesn't work
yet fully).
kfreebsd has a loadable kernel module for ext2/3; I'm not much familiar
with it. It might possibly work as a root filesystem but I doubt anyone
has even tried that before. Similarly there is a reiserfs module I've
never tried.
I don't think FAT would be much use as a root filesystem ;) But it is
available and useful for removable storage like USB/SD mass storage.
NTFS is also available via fuse, a little harder to configure but it
does work.
Also there are network filesystems: SMB/CIFS and NFS.
> Does the installer partitioner use BSD terminology (slices, partitions,
> etc.) which I have always found a bit confusing, or DOS/GNU/Linux
> terminology (just drives and partitions).
The installer allows to choose MSDOS, GPT, BSD or possibly other
disklabels. IIRC it uses MSDOS partitioning by default, unless the disk
is very large then it may choose GPT by default.
With MSDOS disklabels the device naming is like this (with Linux
equivalent shown in brackets) :
Primary: /dev/da0p1 (/dev/sda1)
Extended: /dev/da0p2 (/dev/sda2)
Logical: /dev/da0p5 (/dev/sda5)
> I have a relatively new (circa 2010+) Nvidia GT 540 M, which works well
> with nouveau. I suppose the Sandy Bridge integrated graphics will have
> to do then if I go ahead with this.
You may be the first to try those chipsets, so I don't know what to
expect, please let us know if you do. glxinfo and Xorg.0.log may have
useful info.
> What's laptop support like? My only computer is an ASUS N43SL,
Again, probably nobody has tried on that exact hardware. Works great on
my Thinkpad at least. The hardware you listed looks very friendly to
the free open-source drivers in kfreebsd (just as on Linux).
Wireless networking should work, but probably needs some manual setup
with ifconfig and/or wpa_supplicant.
These are all good questions and probably should go in the Wiki FAQ...
Regards,
--
Steven Chamberlain
steven@pyro.eu.org
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