I want to apologize for straying off on to philosophical and personal tangents with this blog. Part of an apologize is repentance. With that I have a slight review of FreeBSD and a little bit about how to make it user friendly after initial install.
About five years ago was the first time I heard about FreeBSD. I was a new Linux user, and I was soaking up all the information I could about Linux and Unix. FreeBSD is a continuation of the code base for BSD Unix which became popular in the 1970s and 80s with several universities and companies. Its demise in popularity came about from the Unix related lawsuits of the late 80s and early 90s. In the early 90s the code base was ported to the 386 processor (the first 32-bit chip for personal computers) and FreeBSD was born. It's kernel is a micro kernel where different services such as internet protocol are plugged in as a server to the kernel rather than apart of the kernel itself like a monolithic kernel like Linux. For determining which is a better design you can do some digging and use Google because I have no opinion.
After I heard about FreeBSD I downloaded it and wanted to give it a shot. The downside was it didn't want to easily coexist with my Linux partitions so I left it alone for the next four years. After virtual machines became popular I started playing around with it in Qemu which comes default on Fedora, but it refused to work so I left it alone another year.
After I went home this break, my uncle introduced me to VMWare Player. This is free from VMWare, and it supports several operating systems. Considering my role as a network administrator it is a very useful tool. I have lately been working on making a virtual machine to function as a backup for basic operations when our server goes down at school. If the server goes down, I just leave my laptop in a convenient spot and boot up the virtual machine. I can then work on bringing the system back up without twenty people telling me the internet is down.
I decided to give FreeBSD a shot once more. This time we had success. I used most of the default options and tried to install most things I thought I would use or tinker with at least. Everything worked, but it only left me with a command-line. No problem for me seeing I love using the command-line. At the same time though I want the graphical portion to work also. This is what took some work to get setup. The first thing you need to do is install Gnome and GDM. Gnome is the default environment for Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian among others. It normally has a menu at the top left of the screen, a clock in the top right, and task bar on the bottom. GDM is where you login at once the system has started. For GDM to start on startup I had to manually edit the /etc/rc.conf and add the line gdm_enable="YES". After that no users popped into the users box. With a little digging I found out I needed to add procfs to fstab. After that graphical was all working.
Updates are painfully slow. They have many advantages such as saving space by compiling support for only what you need or making it as versatile as you want. Compiling several updates took me a whole week on and off and letting my computer run. Part of the delay involved the need for checking which options I wanted compiled on every package in the segments of the process rather than it all being up front.
My recommendation is FreeBSD is not for the faint in heart. This is something for the advanced user to tinker with or someone with a great deal of patience. If you want to play around with it there is plenty of documentation for it. I may do more with it; I may not.
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