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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