FreeBSD - et tu bruté
OK I wrote a couple weeks ago, with some enthusiasm, about my upcoming FreeBSD experiment.
As I say in the original piece, I did quite some research and I have many years experience with this kind of thing and after a couple silly mistakes, I did indeed have Beasty up and running. I even had X configured for my esoteric wide-screen and flaky graphics card with Fluxbox installed and Firefox surfing happily.
Unfortunately, I failed to set up a software raid for my '/home' partition and caused a crash and when FreeBSD crashes it does it in style. I also crashed it trying to cp (copy) from a EXT3 Linux drive to my new home folder. If you scroll down to the last line in the manual page for copy, you will see why. When FreeBSD crashes (7.0-RELEASE on my hardware - standard install) it starts a never ending cycle of file system checks, file dumps and reboots that really do seem never to have any hope of ending. I left it going for more than 6 hours once before trashing the system and re-installing. each re-boot cycle was taking 6 to 15 minutes.
I reinstalled from scratch at least 6 times and after finally getting everything as I wanted it and re-booting normally it erroneously claimed that '/home' had not been correctly dismounted and proceeded to go through the interminable cycle again. ENOUGH! The towel slapped soggily into the ring with a snotty thud.
I had also by now tried and failed to install DesktopBSD on another machine but it no-likey its graphics hardware. To be honest only one version of Ubuntu and Mint ever did like that machine. At this moment I have only one machine working properly (woe is me) - a fecking Windoze box!
Where to now? I have started trying to install Linux distributions, one after the other, from magazine covers on the most difficult box with no success so far. Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Mint and maybe Suse should work; I'll let you know. It has not all been in vain because those FreeBSD installs taught me much, as did my preliminary research. I have more confidence that I can solve the Linux networking problems and will enjoy getting under the hood. I am frustrated by the Beasty. It seems to me that a system designed to reliably run servers should not crash when attempting to copy files, no matter how corrupt the file system. It should not forget to do something during a legitimate reboot that corrupts a partition and when it attempts to repair any damage it should indicate what, why, how and if when it is doing it.
addendum:
For all you innocents who stumbled on my blog while Googling for FreeBSD, I should just not that the 'final straw' above was my own fault. A little further reading of the excellent manual revealed that despite advice to the contrary (found via Google), 'reboot' is NOT and alias for 'shutdown -r now' in BSD. It does not cause all the proper termination sgnals to be sent. This means that on rebooting the system will find file system errors. ALWAYS USE the 'shutdown' command stoopid!
