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Re: [Sheflug] BSD
Netsonic wrote:
Far be it from that as I remember Jonathan, I'm sure it was a BSD support
page of some kind. If I do come across it again, I'll definitely post the
link.
There is always someone asking about things like this, especially when
people take the flamebait that BSD is dying - it's a natural progression
to "ooo, if we merge 3 sets of users, we'll be bigger and stronger".
Maybe you saw this?
http://daily.daemonnews.org/view_story.php3?story_id=3644
:)))
The actual reason I asked is because I've been snooping around the BSD sites
recently, pondering one of them for my new laptop (Dell Inspiron 8500).
FreeBSD, without question! There's some info on an 8200 at:
http://www.stethojupi.de/laptop_i8200.html
I think Im going to have to try and install over the network this time
though, if thats possible, as my blank CDs have just ran out :)
Yes, you can install from floppies over NFS or FTP. When onsite on a
decent network, I normally use the mini ISO for installations and then
network for the rest, but I used to use floppies - too many bad
experiences on the underground with wiped floppies changed that approach :)
(If anyone here has any experience of BSD on such a laptop, any pointers
would be much appreciated).
OpenBSD is not really geared up to drivers for fancy graphics cards and
it's not something I'd consider running X on. Great for firewall, not so
great for desktop, imho.
NetBSD I haven't used, I don't like the install script, possibly the
most unfriendly I've used.
I've used FreeBSD on a fair few laptops though of an older vintage with
smaller screens, where X is too painful to consider for more than short
bursts. Dell are normally pretty well supported though.
Incidentally, my thoughts on the partition layout come from what I generally
use for Linux which are:
/hda1 - 32 Mb boot partition
/hda2 - 512 Mb swap partition
/hda3 - remaining disk space for root
I know about the arguments for having a separate /home partition and all,
but this layout is nice and simple and has always worked for me.
Any comments ??
I'd be tempted to run:
/ - 512MB
swap - twice your RAM
/var - 2-5GB depending on whether you will run a mail server/MySQL etc.
/usr - remainder of disk
If you haven't made use of portupgrade before, I can highly recommend it
for a more carefree life, just install /usr/ports/sysutils/portupgrade
and 5 minutes with the instructions should be enough. There are some
excellent articles on the O'Reilly OnLAMP site about this.
My installs tend to go like this now:
minimal OS install
install man/ports/src as additional distribution sets
cvsup-without-gui from the installation options
cvsup ports and src
install portupgrade
upgrade cvsup-with-gui with portupgrade
install perl5.8.0 from /usr/ports/lang/perl5.8
everything else
If you install perl at this early stage and run "use.perl port" you
won't have the pain of having to reinstall your perl modules if you
upgrade from the default install.
With FreeBSD 5.1, perl is now not part of the base install, but
installations of apache and MySQL will still trigger it and seem to
default to perl 5.6.
Regards,
Jonathan
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