FreeBSD

Some few days ago, I decided to port my second alternative box to FreeBSD again and believe me, after switching installation disks for more than 50 times I just got rid of install process and well, I found this UNIX-like BSD version 6.1 actually surprising while reiserfs was supported and some other nifty features were included. It looks stable, almost as stable as 5.4, equipped with a 4.4BSD compatible monolithic kernel which is stable as hell (Yahoo! runs on FreeBSD, visit www.netcraft.com for more information) and a valuable collection of ports makes FreeBSD one of the most usable Operating Systems ever designed. Well, I had some few problems with 'mountd' stuff, which I'm still looking for a solution. First problem is I can't export my local ext3 partition just like other two reiserfs and fat partitions of mine which is quite annoying. Second is that loading heavy-weight desktops like GNOME makes the whole system unstable and keeps cpu usage over 40% all the time. I personally think it is related to heavy graphical process load of GNOME desktop and lack of ATi Drivers for bringing 2D and 3D Acceleration to FreeBSD which is a mess. I found out that someone has just started to port ATi FireGL Linux drivers known as fglrx-drivers to FreeBSD. you can find out more at:

http://www.bsdforums.org/forums/showthread.php?threadid=37837 http://www.fglrx-freebsd.com/

it's important to note that the driver uses ATi Proprietary Linux libraries along with ported FreeBSD utilities. It does NOT support 3D-Acceleration though it's still under development, and extremely experimental. you can use it at your own risk and it's important to note that it does NOT work with new X.org snap. Hope ATi releases official OpenSource drivers for it's Radeon cards so that people at OpenSource community can easily port it to FreeBSD and/or any platform needed or release official FreeBSD drivers at least.

Cheers.

Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle.

-- Steinbach