Quoting Rahul Siddharthan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
I've been away from FreeBSD for a few years -- I briefly gave 7.0-CURRENT a spin last year, on an old laptop, but didn't stick with it. However, I'll likely be getting a new laptop soon and I'm tired of linux (and especially tired of Ubuntu, which thinks it's smarter than me.)So I'm seriously considering FreeBSD 7. On the plus side, I've done quite a lot of C programming (though not system-level) since I last used FreeBSD, so I can try some hackery if I need to. On the minus side, I don't want to spend all my time fixing ports or patching device drivers -- I'd rather have a system that just works, and lets me focus on my work. Anyway, I have a few questions: 1. My biggest peeve was the tendency to crash when pulling out USB memory sticks (especially if they were mounted, but sometimes even if they were unmounted). Kris Kennaway told me in a private mail that this has been fixed in 8-CURRENT. Is that so, and has it been MFC'd?
Yes, that's fixed in CURRENT. I don't know if it is / will be merged back to STABLE.
3. How good is Wine on FreeBSD? Can I expect it to be almost as good as Wine on Linux?
It is not as good as Wine on Linux, but it's pretty good already. I use it from time to time.
5. Do linux binaries that require ALSA (eg, flash plugin 9/10) work?
There's a very buggy port of flash 9 which crashes you browser _but_ as you like to use wine, you can just run Windows Firefox with Flash plugin 9/10 without problems.
6. Can I run Windows Vista (likely to be preinstalled -- no choice) under Xen or qemu?
Sorry, no support for Xen yet. AFAIK there is some work ongoing to get VirtualBox running on FreeBSD, but I don't know the current status. qemu runs nicely with kqemu-kmod. I don't know if you can run Vista with it. I heard that XP doesn't run too fast with it but can be usable.
7. How good is power management, in particular cpufreq and ACPI suspend-to-RAM? (I suppose the answer depends on the laptop model.)
You are right here. It depends on the model. There are some problems which prevent multi-core machines to resume after suspend, so you'd need to disable all but one core.
FreeBSD is a great system, but you hit some of its weak spots here. ;-) Lars
pgpkeyyr3TtJV.pgp
Description: Digitale PGP-Unterschrift
