I decided long ago, of all the various Open Source licenses, I prefer the BSD License. It’s the most free, and typical of my philosophical assumptions. With lots of experience playing around on FreeBSD, I was somewhat brokenhearted during the past two years or so when I couldn’t get it to work. It was either a rash of broken ports, with one or more of the packages I use most always out of whack. Or, it was something in the system which refused to work with my hardware.
Recently I decided to remove the Radeon HD 4350 and run the onboard nVidia GeForce 6100. Lots of things just did not quite work for me with that Radeon card.
Last night I installed 8.1 for i386 on my machine, and everything worked. That is, except the bundled X.org ‘nv’ driver, but it wasn’t hard to install the proprietary version, since nVidia and FreeBSD cooperate on the packaging. Without it, the display on my big Dell LCD was badly distorted. The only flaw now is when jumping between X and the console, the latter is often completely garbled or off-center. The work-around is to switch back and forth two or three times until it shows up right. I had to do that in order to kill the X server and install the nVidia driver.
Other than that, I simply installed everything from the DVD as packages. I reserved the buildkernel and buildworld until later to get sound and so forth. I didn’t want to build too many packages without my favorite optimizations.
While poking around, I ran across a couple of conversations about 64-bit, particularly Athlons. More than one writer noted this was not a true 64-bit, but more like a 32-bit with extensions giving the ability to run in 64-bit mode. I’d never seen it put that way before, but realized it was true. That’s the architecture of the x86 chips. So choosing to run 32-bit on my Athlon X2 actually makes good sense. It also helps jump over the hurdles with some of the packages ported not building cleanly in 64-bit.
For the time being, I’m leaning away from building OpenOffice. I’ve done it on FreeBSD before, including on this machine, but that was back in the 1.x and 2.x series. There are fewer gotchas now, but I’m not sure it’s worth it. Every time I try to install the package from GoodDay, it always calls for burdensome updates of too many items in the ports tree. More than likely I’ll just work the Gnome Office; I have OO.org on other systems if I need it.
All in all, things are looking good. Much as I love RHEL and CentOS, I like FreeBSD better, when it’s an option. Right now it is, and a good one for me.
Update: Busted. I couldn’t get the sound driver to smooth out. Frequent pops and interruptions. Couldn’t get any music CD to play without skipping every few seconds. Apparently FreeBSD isn’t quite ready for my three-year-old hardware. Life is tough and you learn more when you fail.
This is not so much a comment on your actions as my perceptions… it seems like you swap OS’s a lot. I primarily run the Windows OS that came on whatever machine I bought. Once or twice I’ve installed SuSE Linux on an older box as a dual boot. I’m wondering… how do you store personal files and get them to work from one OS to the next? e.g. How do you build a spreadsheet or write a letter or manage an e-mail archive in such a way that you can get use of it from a Windows OS one month and a Linux/unix OS the next month? Thanks for any tips you can pass along in this area. I’d like to move to a good, non-MS, non-Apple OS but there are a variety of *nix ones out there. I’m moderately computer savvy but don’t have a lot of time I can dedicate to trying them out and I need to be able to train my wife on enough of it that she’ll be able to browse the web and do some e-mail, word processing and spread-sheeting on rare occasions.
I’ll be the first to tell you I’m always playing with Operating Systems. It’s partly my job as the Associate Editor at OfB (a webzine). It’s also simply a restless mind on the issue. I’m never satisfied, so I don’t pretend loyalty to any of them. Sometimes it’s simply my perception of needs, which can fluctuate at times. My own soul is a moving target, as it were.
The way to preserve these things is eliminating choices which don’t travel well. I won’t use anything which can’t be exported and imported again. Over the years I’ve simply tossed a lot of stuff which I knew I’d never use again. In other words, there is no really easy answer.
For email, best import/export is via Opera. If you can install and run Opera on anything you use, it can be persuaded to pick up the mail and contacts from any OS configuration you choose. The Mozilla-based stuff is a little more tricky, but both require knowing enough about where they all store their stuff. BTW, Opera also makes it easy to transport saved passwords. There isn’t room here to offer the details, but I can explain it.
Documents are a matter of philosophical choices. Most of my stuff is plain text (in a format I settled long ago) or HTML, with printer rules in the associated CSS files. Other documents are produced mostly by OpenOffice. It exports to PDF, MS Office, and some other formats. However, lately Abiword is catching up to those options, and you can get Abiword on just about any OS. Spreadsheets are a little trickier, but Gnumeric and OpenOffice both typically do well with import/export. Only a few esoteric functions won’t translate.
To be honest, I’m not much on keeping a lot of really old stuff. I used to periodically burn a CD of my files and settings, and still have some going back a decade or more. But I never need anything more than a year old, so it has taught me to travel light, as it were. Right now, I have an 8GB thumbdrive where I keep all sorts of things. But even when I forget and wipe a bunch of stuff by accident, I don’t feel I’ve really lost all that much. The only stuff I feel I simply must keep is what shows up on my static website archive. I also have an external harddrive (160GB) for some archives.
If you have the least doubt about leaving Windows, I recommend you find something suitable and use the Windows backup utilities so you can easily restore. As for jumping into the alternative OS world, like everyone else I’m going to recommend Ubuntu. In this case, 10.04 is not the newest, but it is one of the “LTS” releases — one of those selected for long-term support. For at least three years you can be sure of getting fixes and security updates. It’s also the shortest path to getting most of the stuff to which you are accustomed from the Windows world. Something like CentOS has an even longer shelf life, but requires a lot more work for things like common multimedia formats.
Having two harddrives on my machine makes it easier for me to bail out on something which didn’t work out, because the other drive always has something still working. You can always email me for more guidance on anything.