A great reputation she kept up, my God! She kept me up.

[reddragdiva]

I want candy. The finest output of a million monkeys with Model M keyboards on caffeine. But I want to run it on Proper Gentleman's Dissolute Hippie Son's Unix^[*], rather than any of that shoddy Cheap Finnish Imitation.

So I'm considering moving from the present FreeBSD 4.6.2 plus random new libs, packages and the occasional symlink to FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE.

I am not running a server that will stay up four years despite daily Slashdottings. I just want a desktop. With new shiny candy. But an operating system organised on vaguely sane principles, which rules out the Finnish thing.

The FreeBSD UK mailing list considered it an entirely feasible idea. I know _nicolai_ has suffered annoying hardware incompatibilities trying to run it on his laptop. Has anyone else actually used the thing and have any experience to relate?

[*] Apologies to hirez.

Comments

[txxxpxx.livejournal.com]

That was the first reference to BowWowWow I've seen on lj....what, it wasn't a BowWowWow reference. Damn. Now I'm gonna have that song stuck in my head all afternoon.
:P

Right here

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

But I do upgrades weird. I keep a seperate /home partition, and back up all the stuff I need to it. Boot off the CD, install, copy what config files I need back to where they belong, and reconfigure+build+install anything I need. For my OpenBSD machine, the whole process takes maybe 20 minutes. FreeBSD is a little trickier, I tend to rely on packages a lot more. Anyhow, my upgrade and usage of FreeBSD 5.2 has been uneventful. However, I do have one question, which google cannot answer: How do I get *BSD and Windows to get the same IP address from my cable modem's DHCP server? This link (http://www.icts.uct.ac.za/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=140) appears ancient, and does not help.

Re: Right here

[pir.livejournal.com]

If it's a sane DHCP server then if you provide it with the same information in both cases (MAC, dhcp client, hostname, etc) then it should give you the same IP.

If you're not sure what's going out on the wire to the dhcp server from your client then ethereal (for windows and unix) can let you find out.

Re: Right here

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

It's Roadrunner, so god knows. I know it's something to do with what the client is sending, but so far I haven't been able to turn up any info on modifying it so you get the same IP with either OS.

Re: Right here

[pir.livejournal.com]

RR varies a lot by region, but most of the regions seem to use sane UNIX based DHCP servers because they're the only things that can cope with the load.

If it's not consistantly giving you the same IP with one OS between reboots then you likely have no hope (if they set the lease times very short you're screwed - you can check this) working between the different OSen.

If the lease times are reasonable then you should be able to set the information to be the same. The UNIX side is the most flexible, so see what the doze side is sending, use ISC dhclient and mess with dhclient.conf (lots of things you can tweak, list in dhcp-options(5)).

Re: Right here

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I do get the same IP in the same OS. Except when I go *days* without rebooting one or the other. So I guess I'm good there. I'll look at those man pages, cuz in FreeBSD 5.2 there's *nothing* in dhclient.conf I don't think. Just a note that the defaults are usually ok. I don't know of any way to tweak what XP sends.

Re: Right here

[owdbetts.livejournal.com]

It's possible that the IP address you get depends on the hostname (if any) you supply in the request, though I've never heard of a this.* Windows always sends the hostname in the request; not all other clients do (although I'm pretty sure that the ISC dhclient can be made to).

[*] The old @Home network, of course, required you to supply a designated hostname in order for you to be allowed onto the network. And they designated the hostname. But that's not the quite same thing...

[cyn-goth-prog.livejournal.com]

If you want candy, and you'd prefer a tall glass of home-brew UNIX rather than a mouthful of some cheap Finnish rocket-fuel, you could always give Mac OS X a try... :)

I've never used it myself, but I understand it has candy galore, and it'll never fail to troll the trolls.

[j]

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

22:39 < NekoChef> I'm running 5.2-RC
22:39 < NekoChef> haven't rebooted into 5.2-RELEASE
22:39 < NekoChef> the only real gotcha is that 5.2 is still considered -current
and not -stable.
22:39 < NekoChef> SMP probably is still slower then SMP on 4x.
22:40 < NekoChef> though it looks like they've freeed the driver level of the
networking stack to be multithreaded and not serialized
through Giant.
22:40 < NekoChef> KSE is also default now. meaning a more efficient
implementation of pthreads.
22:41 < NekoChef> it's M:N mapping of user:kernel threads.
22:41 < NekoChef> where N = number of CPUs. and whenever a thread enters
kernel to block, that thread is rescheduled to another user
space thread.
22:42 < NekoChef> I don't predeict any real problems with 5.2 other then
possible performance issues.
22:43 < NekoChef> hmm one gotcha, not sure I'd run it on a laptop. not sure
how good the removable services such as network cards are.
22:47 < hellsop> should I paste that into a comment, or do you wanna do the
honors?
22:48 < NekoChef> go for it :)

[pir.livejournal.com]

From rading the -mobile list 5.2-R isn't ready for primetime on most laptops if you want to use newcard for cardbus cards. ACPI is also a work in progress (I see quite a few issues go by with ACPI). With oldcard and APM it sounds usable but I'm not ready to make that leap yet and don't really have any reason to, although it is starting to reach the point where more people are developing for -CURRENT than -STABLE so it won't be tooooo far off for me to start playing with it.

What I'd do (and what I am doing) is go to 4.9 and wait for 5.3.

[fanf]

-CURRENT works better on my laptop than -STABLE, because it knows how to initialize the PCI devices that the BIOS doesn't bother with. Mind you, I'm way behind on FreeBSD right now.

[owdbetts.livejournal.com]

I gave up trying to get 5.0 to boot, and went back to 4.x. Haven't tried anything since...

At work, we're not going to touch 5.x until the FreeBSD project declares it a production release. They're currently aiming to branch the source for the 5.3 release, but I've no idea whether that will still be a new technology release or will be designated a production release.

I'm kind of tempted to install 5.2 on the new home server I'm building, though...

-roy