Questions on FreeBSD today

[Rahul Siddharthan]

I've been away from FreeBSD for a few years -- I briefly gave
7.0-CURRENT a spin last year, on an old laptop, but didn't
stick with it.   However, I'll likely be getting a new laptop soon
and I'm tired of linux (and especially tired of Ubuntu, which
thinks it's smarter than me.)

So I'm seriously considering FreeBSD 7.  On the plus side, I've
done quite a lot of C programming (though not system-level)
since I last used FreeBSD, so I can try some hackery if I need to.
On the minus side, I don't want to spend all my time fixing ports
or patching device drivers -- I'd rather have a system that just
works, and lets me focus on my work.  Anyway, I have a  few
questions:

1. My biggest peeve was the tendency to crash when pulling
   out USB memory sticks (especially if they were mounted,
   but sometimes even if they were unmounted).  Kris Kennaway
   told me in a private mail that this has been fixed in 8-CURRENT.
   Is that so, and has it been MFC'd?

2. Can I run 32-bit linux binaries (like Adobe Reader) on a 64-bit
   FreeBSD setup?

3. How good is Wine on FreeBSD?  Can I expect it to be almost
  as good as Wine on Linux?

4. Is UFS/gjournal at least as reliable as, say, ext3?  I don't
  want long fsck's every time I shutdown uncleanly.

5. Do linux binaries that require ALSA (eg, flash plugin 9/10)
  work?

6. Can I run Windows Vista (likely to be preinstalled -- no
  choice) under Xen or qemu?

7. How good is power management, in particular cpufreq
  and ACPI suspend-to-RAM?  (I suppose the answer depends
  on the laptop model.)

Thanks,

Rahul