FreeBSD Follies

Sorry things have been so quiet here on my FreeBSD blog. To be honest, the reason is that I've sort of drifted away from FreeBSD a little. My server is still running FreeBSD, but I ran into several annoying problems when trying to installed the latest version on one of my older machines and decided to try a Linux flavor instead.

The story is that I have an older machine (an 850mhz overclocked Pentium) that I bought a real cheap big hard drive for, intending to use it as a backup server for the other machines I have here in the house. I was able to pick up a 120gb hard drive for a mere US$49 after rebates - hard to argue with that price! So I figured I would install a Bacula server, and use it to back up all the other machines. This machine does have an old 14gb tape drive on it too, but for price, I could probably just by another hard drive!

So off I went, intending to install the latest FreeBSD, and maybe even play with X11 (either Gnome or KDE) while I was at it. The video card is an ATI All-in-wonder card, which, while old, should still be supported by all flavors of X. It does have a funky UDMA 66 controller (not even UDMA 100), which Windows has a problem with, but I was hoping for the best with my new hard drive.

Unfortunately, after spending a few hours one evening, I just couldn't get FreeBSD 5.3 to work correctly. It may have been bad timing, but the version I was trying to install seemed to be halfway between XFree86 and the X.org X server. Most of the docs, as well as nearly all the hints I found on the web, talked about XFree86 and running a bunch of utilities that just weren't there. And it didn't work "out of the box", which is strange because all the flavors of Linux I've tried on this hardware did. Half the time the X server hung, while the other half the time it worked in a 640x480 mode or something. It was very frustrating, as I couldn't find any docs on how to config the thing, so I was tweaking files without even knowing if they were the right files!

Even when I could get the X server running in some minimal fashion, I kept running into that long time FreeBSD bugaboo, which is that the FreeBSD mouse drivers and KVM (Keyboard/Video/Mouse) switches don't get along at all. I use a fairly popular Belkin 4 system switch to good effect, and no Windows or Linux I've ever run has given me a problem. But I remember running into the "wonky mouse" problem when installing my server, which I just ignore because it doesn't use X. And I see that some things never change, as it was still there, and people were still complaining about it on the mailing list, and the developers were still saying it is a problem with all the KVM switches, not their software. A very frustrating attitude!

And, like I said, no Linux or Windows installation has ever had a problem. Basically, when you swap out of and the back to the machine, the driver loses contact with the mouse and the cursor starts flying all over the place. I think one explanation I read was that the driver was trying to be smart and it turns out it is probably being too smart.

But without some kind of hacks (like replugging in the mouse or using a second mouse), FreeBSD with X is well nigh usesless to me. So I gave up, and put the whole backup server project on hold.

Then I came across a fairly new Linux distro called Xandros, mentioned in an OSNews.com review. Now, I'm a sucker for new OS distributions. Don't ask me why, I just love burning a new CD and seeing what they look like. So I've tried a few different Linux distros, and I use RedHat in my job, so I'm reasonably familiar with using them. There are lots of basic similiarities between FreeBSD and Linux, although many of the admin features are quite different.

So in a Linux distro, I'm really looking for ease of use, especially when it comes to setting it up and administering the system. Doing things like turning on and off servers, keeping it up to date, etc, need to be real easy, as I don't have the time to delve into it like I do with FreeBSD. And let me tell you, Xandros has this in spades!

I guess the 2.x Open Circulation version is the first version from Xandros that could be downloaded for free. It doesn't provide all the functionality of even the Standard Edition (US$50), but is still pretty solid (I don't really need faster than 4x burning speed). You can see the comparison matrix here (they just came out with version 3). The Xandros distro got some real high marks from various reviewers, including the not always reliable Jerry Pournelle in his Chaos Manor (registration required) DDJ article, so I decided to give it a whirl.

Like Pournelle mentions in his column, everything just worked out of the box. KDE installed and worked, Samba installed and worked, the mouse isn't wonky and all is good. I can see the other machines (both Windows and my server running Samba) from this machine and vice-versa. It looks nice and was real easy to update and install new software. It took a little digging to figure out how to point the "Xandros Networks" program (its updater and package manager) to non-official sites, but once I did, I was able to grab Bacula and get it running, albeit with a little pain, as I had to figure out the dependencies myself. Ahh, for the ports functionality, sigh...

But I was very happy how well it worked out of the box and how little work I had to do to get it running. Probably the easiest installation of an OS I've had in ages, and that includes all flavors of Windows. So I think I'm going to stick with Xandros for this machine anyway. I will probably use this blog to log my work on it as well as my FreeBSD machine.