On Monday 28 December 2009 22:49:31 Kaya Saman wrote: > Hi guys, > > first up I hope I am in the right place as my questions are of a generic > nature about FreeBSD as I consider myself a new user not having much > mileage with the OS as of yet! > > Secondly I just wanted to wish everyone a happy Christmas and New Year > also since we are in that period :-) > > I will start with my GUI question as I believe that it is something simple: > > I attempted an install of 7.2 stable on my laptop and subsequently > installed X11also. Now I didn't have any Xorg.conf file but each time I > tried to start X from the CLI using the normal startx command (read the > documentation through fully beforehand) but I didn't manage to get the > mouse or keyboard to even work let alone starting the Gnome2 interface.
The most common cause is that either hald (sysutils/hal) or dbus (devel/dbus) isn't running. Xorg needs them both to detect mouse and keyboard. Add dbus_enable="YES" and hald_enable="YES" to rc.conf to get them to start automatically. > > Now I don't have that particular machine with me now as it's in another > country but just wanted to know a few possible causes for the issue. I > am guessing it's probably tied into not having the xorg.conf file but I > will install a VM of it soon and be more specific with logs etc.... as I > am used to Linux and Sun Solaris I know this is really ad-hoc and > frowned upon way of asking which will probably earn me minus brownie > points but just wanted a quick idea of what maybe so when the time comes > I can investigate further! > > The second and main question that I wish to ask is more to do with > peoples opinions or experienced BSD users advice: > > I am looking to setup a small file server which I will use as DNS and > NTP server also. The reason for selecting FreeBSD is that the system I > about to install onto doesn't have much memory (not sure how much but > probably in the region of 300-500MB perhaps) and although Linux would > definitely suite this kind of system as Solaris needs round 2GB or so > for OpenSolaris, I am quite interested to learn FreeBSD but also take > advantage of the ZFS file system which is standard now in version 8. I agree with Adam Vande More's opinion that UFS2 is the way to go on such a low memory system. UFS2 also works well with large disks (1+ TB) if you tune the newfs parameters a bit (mainly to shorten the fsck time). With geom(8) you can do all kinds of mirroring/striping if you're into RAID. With regards to stability, UFS2 was before the import of ZFS the only filesystem widely used. It is very well tested, and in my opinion, very stable. In fact, I can't remember ever having a UFS2 filesystem go bad to the point I couldn't repair it anymore. If you're expecting lots of power outages, it may be worthwile to set up journaling using gjournal(8), which will reduce fsck times considerably, at the cost of reduced streaming write speed (which will halve unless a dedicated journal disk is used). > > I won't be installing a GUI on this machine since it is going to be a > server so I would like to know if BSD has a small footprint memory and > CPU wise for me to run on the machine in question which is a PIV? That won't be a problem. To illustrate, FreeBSD on a 256MB (i386) machine has about 211MB memory free just after startup. To be safe you could configure a large swap, so the system won't kill the memory hogs as soon as it runs out of memory. > > Also just to make sure: NFS, Samba, NTPd, and ISC's Bind are all > supported on FreeBSD aren't they?? I know this is a bit of an RTFM issue > here but for example the Solaris implementation of NTP and even SNMP are > slightly different from the GNU or GPL based ones in Linux so therefor I > have to ask :-) NFS, BIND, SNMP (bsnmpd) and NTP come with the OS and are installed by default. Samba can be installed from ports. > > Many thanks for any responses!!!! > > Best regards, > > Kaya Good luck! Pieter _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
