Questions on FreeBSD today

[Max Laier]

On Wednesday 09 July 2008 12:04:42 Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
> 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?

No idea, sorry.

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

Yes.

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

There is some ongoing effort from pcbsd.org to improve wine support.  
AFAIK, it's pretty decent already.

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

If you are going to run amd64 and have 1gb+ of ram, zfs is your friend!  
But UFS+gjournal works really well, too.  I doubt, however, that you will 
really need a journal on a Laptop with <500GB HDD.

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

Flash is a PITA, but sound support is not the problem.

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

AFAIK, we don't support Xen dom0 yet.  qemu should work, but that's a 
question for somebody who knows their windows.

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

cpufreq is well-supported, though you might encounter problems with the 
newest CPU families.  Everything else is a WIP and you shouldn't expect 
anything to work out of the box, sorry.

-- 
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