Im new to FreeBSD

Jim Stapleton stapleton.41 at gmail.com
Tue Jun 13 12:14:33 UTC 2006


[resending to newsgroup, since I only replied to the OP]

Well, if Crossover Office ran on FreeBSD, I would probably never boot
my windows machine except as reference to help family with windows
problems.

Your hardware issues are quite good enough.

Applications: Most non-windows operating systems won't run windows
apps. However, with the Wine poject, many will run. For example, I
have been playing Master of Orion III on my my BSD machine under wine,
and it runs _better_ than in Windows. However, getting office, corel
photopaint, visual studios and trillian to install properly seems to
be an effort in futility.

Crossover office would fix many of these problems, but it doesn't seem
to install on FreeBSD, and it seems there is some trickery involved,
using multiple operating systems to get it to work (not worth the
expert, unless you are a major tech savant I suspect).


That being said, the advantages and disadvantages of FreeBSD over the
other main x86 candidate, Linux, at least to my experience;
(1) Installation - FreeBSD is probably one of the most unpleasant
installers to learn, that I've found, it's a lot better in 6.0/6.1
though. It's not gui, which is OK, but there are confusing and
redundant options, that let you go out of order, and change things at
bad times somtimes, and unless you are quite knoledgeable in the
process, you can go out of order and really screw things up. Also, the
hard drive configuration tool can have issues with some drive/chipset
combos (such as a 120GB IDE Western Digital drive on the IDE chipset
of an A8N-E motherboard in my experience). NOTE: Once you learn this,
it's not that bad, and to be honest, it's a one time thing.

(2) Upkeep - FreeBSD is much easier to keep up than linux. (a) you
have this mailing list. I've never seen anyone use "RTFM" here, and
even if they do something similar things, they will at least tell you
*where* to look. (b) The handbook is VERY well written, and is
inordinately useful. (c) Googled howtos and docs for FreeBSD seem to
be better written than the linux equivalents. They don't assume nearly
as high of a user-knowledge as Linux docs tend to, which is nicer to
the novices.

(3) Oh Crap! - On those "Oh Crap!" moments, that happen to everyone,
some strange thing happens and you have to fix some horrible error.
FreeBSDs better documentation, and more helpful error messages make
fixing the issues much easier. The hurried newbie will find him/her
self reinstalling less, and fixing without reinstalling more, saving a
lot of time and effort. BSD is much better here.

(4) App install; I've had horrible luck with *nix app installs, they
allways seem to have some compilation issue in the source file
distributions, unless you have exactly the right setup, and RPMs tend
to lead to dependancy hell worse than any I've ever seen, the yucky
app "yum" doesn't help this much. Debians "apt-get" is better, but
still has it's issues. Ports is insanely reliable, and issues in ports
are relatively easy to fix. FreeBSD is much better here.

(5) Windows application compatability - Crossover Office unfortunately
doesn't work on FreeBSD, so Linux has an advantage here.


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