Chuck(G)
25k Member
I've been surveying some of the newer *nix replacement candidates for Windows XP.
I'm trying both the x64 and x32 candidates when possible. As an extreme acid test for backward compatibility, I"m using as my test machine, an old ASUS K8V board with a 2.4GHz Athlon 64 3400 (Socket 754) and 2GB of memory. The video card is a an old Nvidia GeForce 6600 AGP. NIC is whatever is on the motherboard and there's also a Linksys WMP54GS PCI wireless card installed (Broadcom chipset). Hard disks is a Seagate 320GB SATA drive.
Any OS can run like the wind if it's got enough hardware, but how will it do in hardware-limited conditions?
I've various Linuces using the XFCE desktop (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint...) and they all seem to operate pretty much the same once installed in either 64 or 32 bit mode. Ubuntu seems to be the best organized and easiest to use.
I tried FreeBSD 10.0 (x64 only) with some interesting problems. I had the IDE DVD drive cabled with a 40-conductor cable, since the drive doesn't support the faster transfer modes. The Linuces all installed just fine from DVD, but FreeBSD would boot, then die with a SCSI error on the DVD drive. Turns out that it was trying to run the drive in ATA32 mode--the remedy was to use an 80 conductor IDE cable. There were some bizarre messages during startup with my network settings, but eventually the thing got to its feet.
FreeBSD doesn't come with a desktop pre-configured--you have to install X as well as your desktop of choice from the command line. XFCE did come up, but wouldn't recognize my (PS2) mouse, it required some configuration editing to activate the mouse daemon. In general, I found FreeBSD fairly laggy.
Figuring that I might have done something wrong, I next tried PCBSD 10.0. Better, but it got the display driver wrong, so I had to manually select it. Once selected, the familiar XFCE desktop came up and looked like any other XFCE desktop, pretty much. I don't care for Midori as a browser, so I isntalled Firefox. It took forever--almost 45 minutes. I couldn't figure out what took things so long. Once installed, Firefox got to its feet.
I'm writing this on PCBSD right now.
FreeBSD seems not to have drivers for the Linksys/Broadcom WIFI NIC--I could locate inquiries on the Web, but reports of a successful installation. OTOH, the Linuces ran the Linksys card just fine, once you downloaded the firmware for it.
My reaction thus far is that FreeBSD may be an interesting alternative, but it's not as fast as the Debian-kernel Linuces. Quite honestly, I don't think I'd recommend it, particularly for a new user.
I'm trying both the x64 and x32 candidates when possible. As an extreme acid test for backward compatibility, I"m using as my test machine, an old ASUS K8V board with a 2.4GHz Athlon 64 3400 (Socket 754) and 2GB of memory. The video card is a an old Nvidia GeForce 6600 AGP. NIC is whatever is on the motherboard and there's also a Linksys WMP54GS PCI wireless card installed (Broadcom chipset). Hard disks is a Seagate 320GB SATA drive.
Any OS can run like the wind if it's got enough hardware, but how will it do in hardware-limited conditions?
I've various Linuces using the XFCE desktop (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint...) and they all seem to operate pretty much the same once installed in either 64 or 32 bit mode. Ubuntu seems to be the best organized and easiest to use.
I tried FreeBSD 10.0 (x64 only) with some interesting problems. I had the IDE DVD drive cabled with a 40-conductor cable, since the drive doesn't support the faster transfer modes. The Linuces all installed just fine from DVD, but FreeBSD would boot, then die with a SCSI error on the DVD drive. Turns out that it was trying to run the drive in ATA32 mode--the remedy was to use an 80 conductor IDE cable. There were some bizarre messages during startup with my network settings, but eventually the thing got to its feet.
FreeBSD doesn't come with a desktop pre-configured--you have to install X as well as your desktop of choice from the command line. XFCE did come up, but wouldn't recognize my (PS2) mouse, it required some configuration editing to activate the mouse daemon. In general, I found FreeBSD fairly laggy.
Figuring that I might have done something wrong, I next tried PCBSD 10.0. Better, but it got the display driver wrong, so I had to manually select it. Once selected, the familiar XFCE desktop came up and looked like any other XFCE desktop, pretty much. I don't care for Midori as a browser, so I isntalled Firefox. It took forever--almost 45 minutes. I couldn't figure out what took things so long. Once installed, Firefox got to its feet.
I'm writing this on PCBSD right now.
FreeBSD seems not to have drivers for the Linksys/Broadcom WIFI NIC--I could locate inquiries on the Web, but reports of a successful installation. OTOH, the Linuces ran the Linksys card just fine, once you downloaded the firmware for it.
My reaction thus far is that FreeBSD may be an interesting alternative, but it's not as fast as the Debian-kernel Linuces. Quite honestly, I don't think I'd recommend it, particularly for a new user.