Originally posted at Blog.AlexConrey.com
Now, I know that FreeBSD-CURRENT is 9, but I use 8 for stability purposes. With that said, lets get down to business, shall we?
FreeBSD is a BSD-spun distro that you simply cannot ignore. With FreeBSD, you get the power of a light operating system and the elegance of the ports system. With the ports system, not only do you not need to manually compile things, but all dependencies are solved 99.9% of the time, with zero issues. However FreeBSD is not for the Linux beginner, but it is easily learned and when you know how to use it, it is a very nice system.
Install.
The install is simple yet not for the inexperienced. For me, and I’ve installed FreeBSD many times now, the hardest thing to figure out was the partitioning of the drives, which I do believe is cfdisk on the FreeBSD installer. Now, the install took a little over 10 minutes, but it will take longer with a slower internet connection (assuming you did the FTP install). This machine has 512MB RAM and a 2.2Ghz Intel Pentium 4 processor, so it isn’t all too slow. When you’re installing FreeBSD, you want to install the ports, as it will save you a lot of time. You will avoid having to use portsnap, however when you want to update all of your ports, you will have to use the portsnap program (which is to be covered in a later post.)
Ports.
One of the things about FreeBSD is the ports system. Ports is simply a way to install a package you want, without having to know fancy package management terms. If you wanted to say, install ‘irssi’, its quite simple.
cd /usr/ports/irc/irssi && make install clean
Every program in the ports system has its own directory (for better or for worse), so you are able to build it in that directory. Simple enough, right? It’s designed so that the average user, assuming they know the program the want to install, can simply ‘cd’ into the ports directory for that program, and make it. No compilation, no package management dependency hell, just straight forward compilation.
If you’re a user that doesn’t like the idea of having to cd into a directory, or knowing which category its under, don’t fret! pkg_add is available! Now, I won’t go into depth, but if you want to install irssi with pkg_add, you would issue the following code.
pkg_add -r irssi.
Desktop.
Before I go any further, let me just warn you of the lack – rather total absence – of Flash support in FreeBSD 8. However, seeing as Flash can just go away (this is just my opinion here), it isn’t a reason to totally disregard FreeBSD. In a way, not having Flash can make for a potentially more secure system. Like most distributions, you can get X working without much pain. My personal window manager of choice is Fluxbox. You can install any window manager, ports is full of them, some that you may have not even heard of, most of these WM’s can be found under x11-wm in ports. One downside to the base install is that bash is not installed, which means, you’re defaulted to /bin/sh, which isn’t the end of the world. A simple install from ports clears that issue right up. Other than the core system, it looks no different than any other linux distribution with fluxbox would.
Server.
As a server, it functions very nicely. It, again, functions no different than any other linux distribution would. Seeing a trend here? It’s very much like linux in every aspect.
Overall, FreeBSD is a great OS that I think everyone needs to try out, or just look into a bit further. Though, its lack of flash may be a setback in the future, it is a very stable and well thought out OS. The ports system is pure genius, making the installation of packages and programs even more simple for the end user.