Questions on FreeBSD today
Lars Engels
lme at FreeBSD.org
Wed Jul 9 14:34:17 UTC 2008
Quoting Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd120 at gmail.com>:
> 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?
Yes, that's fixed in CURRENT. I don't know if it is / will be merged
back to STABLE.
> 3. How good is Wine on FreeBSD? Can I expect it to be almost
> as good as Wine on Linux?
It is not as good as Wine on Linux, but it's pretty good already. I
use it from time to time.
> 5. Do linux binaries that require ALSA (eg, flash plugin 9/10)
> work?
There's a very buggy port of flash 9 which crashes you browser _but_
as you like to use wine, you can just run Windows Firefox with Flash
plugin 9/10 without problems.
>
> 6. Can I run Windows Vista (likely to be preinstalled -- no
> choice) under Xen or qemu?
Sorry, no support for Xen yet. AFAIK there is some work ongoing to get
VirtualBox running on FreeBSD, but I don't know the current status.
qemu runs nicely with kqemu-kmod. I don't know if you can run Vista
with it. I heard that XP doesn't run too fast with it but can be usable.
> 7. How good is power management, in particular cpufreq
> and ACPI suspend-to-RAM? (I suppose the answer depends
> on the laptop model.)
You are right here. It depends on the model. There are some problems
which prevent multi-core machines to resume after suspend, so you'd
need to disable all but one core.
FreeBSD is a great system, but you hit some of its weak spots here. ;-)
Lars
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