intro

[Paul Pathiakis]

+1 on TrueOS.... they are doing a fine job.  It's on my gf (50+) desktop 
and her mother's (80+) desktop... for the last 5 years.... They LOVE IT!!!

P


On 10/10/2017 16:51, Pete Wright wrote:
>
>
> On 10/10/2017 13:29, Tom Rushworth wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> A few quick words to say where I'm coming from:
>>
>> I'm a long time C programmer, mostly userland, but I have done some 
>> kernel work.  I was doing Linux USB drivers in the early 2000's, and 
>> I tinkered with the NetBSD serial driver way back when serial ports 
>> were actually useful.  I wrote my first serious C program in the late 
>> 1970s.
>>
>> I'm a FreeBSD desktop user, driven out of MacOS by the marketroids, 
>> and driven out of Linux by systemd :).
>>
>> I recently purchased a new desktop machine that turns out to have an 
>> Intel Iris Pro P6300 (Broadwell GT3e) graphics system. It came with 
>> Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon, which manages the screen very nicely, so 
>> the Linux driver is good enough.  I ran into issues with ssh within 
>> hours of starting up, and I'm just not interested in digging through 
>> yet another (foolish) system administration issue involving systemd 
>> to sort it out.
>>
>> I tried FreeBSD 11.1, but the i915 driver there isn't quite up to the 
>> job.  I've looked at the various FreeBSD i915 websites and 
>> discussions, but can't easily sort out where the current focus is.
>>
>> What I'd like from the list is advice on where to start :).  I'm 
>> willing to test pre-built stuff, or build it myself, or even work on 
>> the code, but everything I looked at seemed to have ground to a halt 
>> about a year ago.
>>
>> So, where to begin?
>
> I'd suggest taking a look at TrueOS to see if the updated i915 support 
> in there offers you a better X experience.
>
> https://www.trueos.org/
>
> TrueOS is FreeBSD with some nice prebuilt additions for desktops and 
> laptops.  They even have a live image that should allow you to verify 
> X is working as expected before you install it.
>
> If you are wanting to run vanilla FreeBSD and don't mind periodic 
> instability you can also run 12-CURRENT and install the 
> "drm-next-kmod" pkg.  Although depending on how much time you want to 
> put into hacking on things TrueOS may be an easier entry point for you.
>
> HTH!
> -pete
>