Re: New to FreeBSD - Some questions
On 21 June 2012 04:24, Fred Morcos fred.mor...@gmail.com wrote: Introduction and background q) Is it possible to run a FreeBSD system without much building? In other words, can I survive by depending on packages and only resorting to ports when really needed? To an extent. It is currently possible to use only packages, but they tend to be out of date and upgrading is non-easy without a third party tool (such as portmaster or portupgrade). There is currently active work to fix these issues in a project called pkgng. This will likely become the default in the next couple of months. q) Where does the FreeBSD project stand on this matter? From what I noticed is that the base system seems to adhere to the tranditional flat text files for configuration and simple tools that do a good job, leaving it up to the user to combine those small tools to create larger, more complex ones (a UNIX inheritance). FreeBSD tends to be conservative. The project won't implement a complex daemon without clear benefits and specific discussion on the pros and cons. q) Is a FreeBSD stable base system with current high-level components possible? Will it avoid the issues I experienced on Linux-based systems? Generally, yes. There will likely be some adjustment period as you learn how FreeBSD works, but most people have few problems. q) I would assume UFS with J+SU is fast enough for a laptop? Yes. Most people call it SU+J ;). Don't use it for an SSD though q) Does ZFS make sense on a laptop? Any advantages of using it over USF with J+SU? I am not interested in any striping or mirroring on the laptops, but the compression features is very attractive for the HDDs in the first laptop. ZFS is ram hog. How much ram does your laptop have? q) The second laptop has an SSD, would UFS with/without J and with/without SU or ZFS make more sense for it? Make sure to enable TRIM support if your SSD supports it. q) Can I live with a desktop environment (Gnome or KDE) and desktop applications (Firefox, Libreoffice, etc) by relying only on packages? Sort of. With pkgng this will become a lot easier. If you are currently willing to deal with out of date packages until pkgng becomes default (or want to work with non-default technology now) it will be possible. q) Does the NVIDIA binary driver work reliably? I would like to hear personal experiences with that. Yes. This has never been the cause of any problem for me q) Does the bsdinstall align partitions to device blocks by default for optimal speed? If not, I have found that I can use gpart with -a and -b which will require me to calculate the start and end offsets of each partition manually. Is there a tool that can automatically do that for me? You said you had an SSD: it doesn't matter. q) Adding tmpmfs=YES to /etc/rc.conf is analogous to a tmpfs /tmp on Linux-based systems, correct? Yes. Any other directories that might make sense to have as an mfs (ie, in /var)? Don't use tmpfs for anything in /var q) Is there a place where all sysctl variables are documented? It occurred to me when I was trying to find the memory usage on my system but `sysctl -a | grep mem' shows a whole bunch of stuff. You can try sysctl -ad but most of the systls are either documented in man pages or not at all. :( q) How can I set proxy settings system-wide? Same for PACKAGESITE (for the pkg_* tools), how can I set a mirror system-wide? /etc/profile? Same as any other unix system. It depends on what shell you use. q) I noticed all file/data-sizes are in bytes (ls, dd, etc), is there a way to change that system-wide to be in human-readable format? usually adding -h (for human) helps. Also try setting BLOCKSIZE. each program might have some more explanation in the man page. System To assess my understanding, the system is split into kernel, base, documentation, games, lib32 (on 64-bit systems) and ports. This distinction is rarely used. The only place that cares for these differences is the installer. There is another split between base and ports where base includes everything previously mentioned minus ports. This is the one that matters Now, there are 3 branches of the base system: RELEASE, STABLE and CURRENT. RELEASE means 9.0 and stays that way until 10.0 is released. STABLE means 9.0, 9.1, 9.2, etc. CURRENT means trunk in SVN terms. Is all that correct? This is incorrect. RELEASE are all releases: There is 9.0, 9.1, 9.2, etc. STABLE is a misnomer: it is a *development* branch but the ABI / KPI is kept stable. CURRENT is HEAD and where new commits go before being MFCed or Merged From Current to -stable. Releases are branched from -STABLE. -STABLE is branched from -HEAD. Also, when somewhere is mentioned `make world', this means to rebuild all installed ports which doesn't include base, I assume? make world is always wrong. make buildworld is closer. In source land world is everything
Re: New to FreeBSD - Some questions
On 22/06/2012 18:40, Eitan Adler wrote: q) Is there a place where all sysctl variables are documented? It occurred to me when I was trying to find the memory usage on my system but `sysctl -a | grep mem' shows a whole bunch of stuff. You can try sysctl -ad but most of the systls are either documented in man pages or not at all. :( It would be a really handy thing if the output of 'sysctl -d' told you what man page to refer to for more information. A neat little project but pretty boring to implement. Cheers, Matthew -- Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 7 Priory Courtyard Flat 3 PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Ramsgate JID: matt...@infracaninophile.co.uk Kent, CT11 9PW signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: New to FreeBSD - Some questions
On Jun 22, 2012 10:42 AM, Eitan Adler li...@eitanadler.com wrote: On 21 June 2012 04:24, Fred Morcos fred.mor...@gmail.com wrote: Introduction and background q) Is it possible to run a FreeBSD system without much building? In other words, can I survive by depending on packages and only resorting to ports when really needed? To an extent. It is currently possible to use only packages, but they tend to be out of date and upgrading is non-easy without a third party tool (such as portmaster or portupgrade). There is currently active work to fix these issues in a project called pkgng. This will likely become the default in the next couple of months. q) Where does the FreeBSD project stand on this matter? From what I noticed is that the base system seems to adhere to the tranditional flat text files for configuration and simple tools that do a good job, leaving it up to the user to combine those small tools to create larger, more complex ones (a UNIX inheritance). FreeBSD tends to be conservative. The project won't implement a complex daemon without clear benefits and specific discussion on the pros and cons. q) Is a FreeBSD stable base system with current high-level components possible? Will it avoid the issues I experienced on Linux-based systems? Generally, yes. There will likely be some adjustment period as you learn how FreeBSD works, but most people have few problems. q) I would assume UFS with J+SU is fast enough for a laptop? Yes. Most people call it SU+J ;). Don't use it for an SSD though q) Does ZFS make sense on a laptop? Any advantages of using it over USF with J+SU? I am not interested in any striping or mirroring on the laptops, but the compression features is very attractive for the HDDs in the first laptop. ZFS is ram hog. How much ram does your laptop have? q) The second laptop has an SSD, would UFS with/without J and with/without SU or ZFS make more sense for it? Make sure to enable TRIM support if your SSD supports it. q) Can I live with a desktop environment (Gnome or KDE) and desktop applications (Firefox, Libreoffice, etc) by relying only on packages? Sort of. With pkgng this will become a lot easier. If you are currently willing to deal with out of date packages until pkgng becomes default (or want to work with non-default technology now) it will be possible. q) Does the NVIDIA binary driver work reliably? I would like to hear personal experiences with that. Yes. This has never been the cause of any problem for me q) Does the bsdinstall align partitions to device blocks by default for optimal speed? If not, I have found that I can use gpart with -a and -b which will require me to calculate the start and end offsets of each partition manually. Is there a tool that can automatically do that for me? You said you had an SSD: it doesn't matter. q) Adding tmpmfs=YES to /etc/rc.conf is analogous to a tmpfs /tmp on Linux-based systems, correct? Yes. Any other directories that might make sense to have as an mfs (ie, in /var)? Don't use tmpfs for anything in /var q) Is there a place where all sysctl variables are documented? It occurred to me when I was trying to find the memory usage on my system but `sysctl -a | grep mem' shows a whole bunch of stuff. You can try sysctl -ad but most of the systls are either documented in man pages or not at all. :( q) How can I set proxy settings system-wide? Same for PACKAGESITE (for the pkg_* tools), how can I set a mirror system-wide? /etc/profile? Same as any other unix system. It depends on what shell you use. q) I noticed all file/data-sizes are in bytes (ls, dd, etc), is there a way to change that system-wide to be in human-readable format? usually adding -h (for human) helps. Also try setting BLOCKSIZE. each program might have some more explanation in the man page. System To assess my understanding, the system is split into kernel, base, documentation, games, lib32 (on 64-bit systems) and ports. This distinction is rarely used. The only place that cares for these differences is the installer. There is another split between base and ports where base includes everything previously mentioned minus ports. This is the one that matters Now, there are 3 branches of the base system: RELEASE, STABLE and CURRENT. RELEASE means 9.0 and stays that way until 10.0 is released. STABLE means 9.0, 9.1, 9.2, etc. CURRENT means trunk in SVN terms. Is all that correct? This is incorrect. RELEASE are all releases: There is 9.0, 9.1, 9.2, etc. STABLE is a misnomer: it is a *development* branch but the ABI / KPI is kept stable. CURRENT is HEAD and where new commits go before being MFCed or Merged From Current to -stable. Releases are branched from -STABLE. -STABLE is branched from -HEAD. Also, when somewhere is mentioned `make world', this means to
Re: New to FreeBSD - Some questions
On 22 June 2012 11:44, Matthew Seaman m.sea...@infracaninophile.co.uk wrote: On 22/06/2012 18:40, Eitan Adler wrote: q) Is there a place where all sysctl variables are documented? It occurred to me when I was trying to find the memory usage on my system but `sysctl -a | grep mem' shows a whole bunch of stuff. You can try sysctl -ad but most of the systls are either documented in man pages or not at all. :( It would be a really handy thing if the output of 'sysctl -d' told you what man page to refer to for more information. A neat little project but pretty boring to implement. Agreed. I don't have the time to do this directly, but I'm willing to commit patches that do this. -- Eitan Adler ___ 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
Re: New to FreeBSD - Some questions
On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 1:18 PM, Eitan Adler li...@eitanadler.com wrote: On 22 June 2012 11:44, Matthew Seaman m.sea...@infracaninophile.co.uk wrote: On 22/06/2012 18:40, Eitan Adler wrote: q) Is there a place where all sysctl variables are documented? It occurred to me when I was trying to find the memory usage on my system but `sysctl -a | grep mem' shows a whole bunch of stuff. You can try sysctl -ad but most of the systls are either documented in man pages or not at all. :( It would be a really handy thing if the output of 'sysctl -d' told you what man page to refer to for more information. A neat little project but pretty boring to implement. Agreed. I don't have the time to do this directly, but I'm willing to commit patches that do this. -- Eitan Adler ___ 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 that sounds great, also, for the moment you can try grep in /usr/src and usually find what you are looking for there. Usually the source code is well-documented, and you can see which switches do what. an idea... Waitman Gobble San Jose California USA ___ 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
Re: New to FreeBSD - Some questions
On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 9:58 PM, Wojciech Puchar woj...@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl wrote: I'm quite new to FreeBSD too (RHEL/Fedora background), and am most impressed with it so far. rather huge difference. Secondly (and probably stating the obvious), the handbook http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ is the place I always look first. and third - manuals. They are in sync with system and actually VERY useful. while i was still (long time ago) using linux most common manual was like this manual is outdated. Use texinfo documentation. and texinfo docs was often outdated too. Today it is most probably look at wikipedia ;) Of course i means FreeBSD base system, ports are not part of FreeBSD and quality varies. ___ 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 I will go with a single thread. I will also try to keep it as short as possible. Please note that it is not my intention to start a flame-war against anyone or any project. I am stating my experiences, the goals I would like to achieve and some questions I have. Suggestions and directions (to put me on track) are greatly welcome and appreciated. Questions will be marked with a q) at the beginning of the line. Introduction and background I have been using GNU/Linux for quite a while and I am most comfortable with Archlinux. The reason I like it is it's simplicity from the ground up without wasting too much time on unimportant details (unless you want to). Another strong point is that it provides binary packages by default, user-building of packages if you want to, and the same level of customization you can achieve with - say - Gentoo Linux. FreeBSD seems to provide that. I learned over the years that (re-)compilation of packages is not something I want to do regularly, but something I would like to do only when I need and want to (ie, to strip out or add a certain compile-time feature from/to a package). I also learned that the performance gains of tuning compiler flags for a certain CPU are not that drastic for a desktop/laptop/workstation machine workflow and that this category of computing is mostly bound by IO speed (especially with HDDs). q) Is it possible to run a FreeBSD system without much building? In other words, can I survive by depending on packages and only resorting to ports when really needed? What set me off, and got me tired of dealing with Linux-based systems is a set of patterns that have been repeating over for some years now. Generally: 1. Too often, core system components break (especially with every Linux kernel release). 1. Yesterday I spent 30 minutes until my webcam worked, dealing with v4l, gstreamer and cheese. 2. The USB3 port in my laptop used to work as USB2 (never as USB3), not anymore, it's now completely useless and doesn't react to anything. 2. Sudden drastic changes that are deviating from simplicity. 1. The sudden flood of daemons that are designed to do everything for me, without giving me much say in the matter. My computer is supposed to help me, not decide for me or replace me. 2. Those daemons are hard to get rid of and are tightly integrated into higher-level components in the stack (ie, into the desktop environment). 3. Those daemons are increasingly hard and obscure to configure (ie, huge XML files, complex hierarchies, etc). 3. Due to having to run and interact with each other all the time, those daemons are sucking the life out of my laptop battery (according to powertop). 4. Probably other frustrations that I have forgotten about. 5. I think many of the developers of those components are trying to reach a Mac-like experience? I am not against that in any way, but it needs to be working well. Those are dbus, hal, udev, udisks, upower, pulseaudio, systemd, consolekit and policykit. I am aware that those solutions are there to solve complex problems (thus their inherent complexity) and that many bright people with a lot of experience have thought about them and worked on those projects. My frustration is that those solutions are: 1. At the cost of making simple tasks more complex. 2. Replacing or conflicting with the previously existing solution. 3. Sometimes very unstable and unusable. q) Where does the FreeBSD project stand on this matter? From what I noticed is that the base system seems to adhere to the tranditional flat text files for configuration and simple tools that do a good job, leaving it up to the user to combine those small tools to create larger, more complex ones (a UNIX inheritance). q) Is a FreeBSD stable base system with current high-level components possible? Will it avoid the issues I experienced on Linux-based systems? My goal I
Re: New to FreeBSD - Some questions
___ 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 I will go with a single thread. I will also try to keep it as short as possible. Please note that it is not my intention to start a flame-war against anyone or any project. I am stating my experiences, the goals i - in reply - just told you my experiences with linux which was actually my first unix-like OS. I learned over the years that (re-)compilation of packages is not something I want to do regularly, but something I would like to do only when I need and want to (ie, to strip out or add a certain compile-time feature from/to a package). I also learned that the performance gains of tuning compiler flags for a certain CPU are not that drastic for a desktop/laptop/workstation machine workflow and that this category of computing is mostly bound by IO speed (especially with HDDs). true. anyway if you want anything else that default compile options you have to rebuild. q) Is it possible to run a FreeBSD system without much building? In you may use all binary packages. You may even do pkg_add ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/.../packagename.tbz and it works, and will fetch dependencies too if needed. you may use source builds, or mix of both. you just do portsnap fetch portsnap update to get ports tree up to date. other words, can I survive by depending on packages and only resorting to ports when really needed? it depends on ports. Some are easy to deal with some are not. 1. Too often, core system components break (especially with every Linux kernel release). 1. Yesterday I spent 30 minutes until my webcam worked, dealing with v4l, gstreamer and cheese. 2. The USB3 port in my laptop used to work as USB2 (never as USB3), not anymore, it's now completely useless and doesn't react to anything. This programs are not part of FreeBSD, just as they are not part of linux (linux is kernel). webcamd, gstreamer etc.. are still the same programs no matter if you compile then under linux and freebsd. as for point 2 it would probably be better with FreeBSD :) 2. Sudden drastic changes that are deviating from simplicity. In that respect FreeBSD is 100 times better. But still - PORTS are not FreeBSD. There are tens of thousands of them. Most are the same programs that run on linux, just packaging differ. And nobody can be sure something will not get f...d up. 1. The sudden flood of daemons that are designed to do everything for me, without giving me much say in the matter. My computer is supposed to help me, not decide for me or replace me. FreeBSD starts only inetd and cron by default. As for me it is already too much in /etc/crontab :) 2. Those daemons are hard to get rid of and are tightly integrated into higher-level components in the stack (ie, into the desktop environment). No such a problem under FreeBSD. But when compiling xorg-server from ports i recommend turning off SUID and HAL options. 3. Those daemons are increasingly hard and obscure to configure (ie, huge XML files, complex hierarchies, etc). FreeBSD base system is not like that. But still - if you use the same thing that in linux it would be the same. Anyway human have brain and can use it. So prepare your environment that would fit your needs and nothing else. 3. Due to having to run and interact with each other all the time, those daemons are sucking the life out of my laptop battery (according to powertop). No such problem on my laptop. It runs 1.5 hours longer than official specs. enable powerd in /etc/rc.conf - powerd is a part of base system, not addon. Works great. 4. Probably other frustrations that I have forgotten about. You should not forgot them so you will not ever want to go back to linux. 5. I think many of the developers of those components are trying to reach a Mac-like experience? I am not against that in any way, but it needs to be working well. I don't really know what linux community want to achieve. For my observation they wanted to compete with microsoft windows. And they exceeded the target - it's even more messy and uncontrollable. Those are dbus, hal, udev, udisks, upower, pulseaudio, systemd, consolekit and policykit. You do not need any of them under FreeBSD. It is useful to have dbus daemon running for whole machine in many use cases but not really needed. I am aware that those solutions are there to solve complex problems which was first created. I have two laptops (Asus N73JQ, Asus U36S) which I use as work machines. Power efficiency is very important, efficient disk access too. Suspend to ram and hiberation would be nice to have but are not utterly important. q) I would assume UFS with J+SU is fast enough for a laptop? If you have
Re: New to FreeBSD - Some questions
Fred Morcos writes: q) Is it possible to run a FreeBSD system without much building? In other words, can I survive by depending on packages and only resorting to ports when really needed? Mostly, yes. There are down-sides, but if you're building a client where specific functionality is not needed and performance is not crucial - yes. 1. Too often, core system components break (especially with every Linux kernel release). 1. Yesterday I spent 30 minutes until my webcam worked, dealing with v4l, gstreamer and cheese. 2. The USB3 port in my laptop used to work as USB2 (never as USB3), not anymore, it's now completely useless and doesn't react to anything. To work in FreeBSD-land, you're going to need to understand the difference between the system and the ports. Also, the difference between CURRENT and STABLE releases. See the Handbook for more information. 2. Sudden drastic changes that are deviating from simplicity. 1. The sudden flood of daemons that are designed to do everything for me, without giving me much say in the matter. My computer is supposed to help me, not decide for me or replace me. Not much of this. 2. Those daemons are hard to get rid of and are tightly integrated into higher-level components in the stack (ie, into the desktop environment). Those are dbus, hal, udev, udisks, upower, pulseaudio, systemd, consolekit and policykit. Hal and dbus are used by a fair number of programs; many can be compiled not to used them, with varying consequences. As for the others: on a system with 882 ports installed, 44 use pulseaudio, 61 use consolekit and 62 use policykit. (Porbably a high degree of overlap there.) 5. I think many of the developers of those components are trying to reach a Mac-like experience? I am not against that in any way, but it needs to be working well. Everything is a work in progress. :-) q) Does ZFS make sense on a laptop? Any advantages of using it over USF with J+SU? I am not interested in any striping or mirroring on the laptops, but the compression features is very attractive for the HDDs in the first laptop. I am given to understand ZFS can do some wonderful things ... but uses a _lot_ of memory, which may be unacceptable. q) Can I live with a desktop environment (Gnome or KDE) and desktop applications (Firefox, Libreoffice, etc) by relying only on packages? Yes, assuming you're willing to live with the default options for each. Note: there may be ports whose packages are - for various reasons - not of the most recent version. q) I noticed all file/data-sizes are in bytes (ls, dd, etc), is there a way to change that system-wide to be in human-readable format? Check out the BLOCKSIZE environment variable, and the -H/-h setting to individual programs. q) Is there a tool that can test a set of mirrors for connection time and speed (for packages and ports)? Analogous to Archlinux's rankmirrors? sysutils/fastest_cvsup q) I noticed in the ports collection that there were some outdated packages (skype-2.2, gimp-2.6), should I report that and where? (A PR?) Generally - the right people know. What they don't know is when they will have the time (and in some cases, motivation) to import (and test) the latest version. Anyone can submit patches. The default person in charge of dealing with patches is the maintainer, who can be identified by going to the port directory and doing make MAINTAINER. Talking to the maintainer about new versions and trouble with old versions is both polite and (usually) more efficient. (For some large projects - Gnome, KDE, Mozilla, Java, etc. - the maintainer is a team.) Robert Huff ___ 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
Re: New to FreeBSD - Some questions
On 21/06/2012 12:24, Fred Morcos wrote: q) I am currently considering 3 disks for a home micro-server, with ZFS striping with the third disk being a parity disk. In case I decide to buy a fourth disk in the future and add it to the pool, is ZFS capable of re-structuring the data on-the-fly to have 2 sets of striping (without parity, so 2 disks each) and on top of that a mirror? Analogous to the following: +---+ |Stripe2 mirrors Stripe1| +---+---+ |Stripe1|Stripe2| +---+---+---+---+ | Disk1 | Disk2 | Disk3 | Disk4 | +---+---+---+---+ Just picking one of your questions arbitrarily -- not that there's anything wrong with the others, but this I had to comment on. And the comment is: Don't do it like that. viz. Don't mirror the stripes: stripe the mirrors instead. +---+ |Stripe | +---+---+ |Mirror1|Mirror2| +---+---+---+---+ | Disk1 | Disk2 | Disk3 | Disk4 | +---+---+---+---+ Why this way? Well, consider what happens if one of your disks fails. With your original plan (RAID0+1): A failed disk in a stripe immediately takes the whole stripe out of action, so you're left operating on only two drives and you have no resilience to further failures. With my plan (RAID10): A failed drive means you lose resilience in one of the mirrors -- the other mirror can carry on as usual, and you will still be making full use of all the remaining drives. It's also faster to recover when you replace the failed drive -- you only have to resilver one disk's worth. Now, your actual question: can you convert a RAIDz (which is what I assume you mean by with the third disk being a parity disk) to a RAID10 transparently? No. You can add another vdev (ie. a disk, mirrored pair or RAIDz group) to expand the size, but you can't radically rearrange the devices in your zpool without manual intervention. What you can do is: add your new disk to the system, and remove one drive from your RAIDz (so the RAIDz is running in degraded mode). You can create a new zpool from those two disks -- temporarily as a RAID0 stripe across the pair. You can then do 'zfs send' | 'zfs receive' to copy your filesystem contents over to the new zpool. Reboot so the system is running live on the new zpool, destroy the old zpool and then insert those drives into the new zpool so they mirror drives already there. That's a lot of copying stuff around, and all the while you won't have any resilience against disk failure. Plenty of scope for disastrous errors. Make sure you have very good backups. Cheers, Matthew -- Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: New to FreeBSD - Some questions
+---+ |Stripe | +---+---+ |Mirror1|Mirror2| +---+---+---+---+ | Disk1 | Disk2 | Disk3 | Disk4 | +---+---+---+---+ true. but there are mirror/stripe layout that is quite better in performance than yours where writes are not dominant ;) ___ 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
Re: New to FreeBSD - Some questions
Hi, On Thursday 21 June 2012 18:24:26 Fred Morcos wrote: On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 9:58 PM, Wojciech Puchar q) Is it possible to run a FreeBSD system without much building? In other words, can I survive by depending on packages and only resorting to ports when really needed? you can run both the operating system and the ports from prebuilt binaries. What set me off, and got me tired of dealing with Linux-based systems is a set of patterns that have been repeating over for some years now. Generally: 1. Too often, core system components break (especially with every Linux kernel release). You will not find this kind of chaos here. Maybe a hint. I leave always one big release out. With other words. If you start now with 9, you do not have to move to 10 but you can stick with 9 until 11 comes out. You do not even have to upgrade at the spot. 1. Yesterday I spent 30 minutes until my webcam worked, dealing with v4l, gstreamer and cheese. 2. The USB3 port in my laptop used to work as USB2 (never as USB3), not anymore, it's now completely useless and doesn't react to anything. Things like this happened in the past too. But it is very, very rare and happens most likely with older hardware and not new one. 2. Sudden drastic changes that are deviating from simplicity. 1. The sudden flood of daemons that are designed to do everything for me, without giving me much say in the matter. My computer is supposed to help me, not decide for me or replace me. Welcome to Linux. 2. Those daemons are hard to get rid of and are tightly integrated into higher-level components in the stack (ie, into the desktop environment). 3. Those daemons are increasingly hard and obscure to configure (ie, huge XML files, complex hierarchies, etc). This was avoided here. 3. Due to having to run and interact with each other all the time, those daemons are sucking the life out of my laptop battery (according to powertop). I do not wonder. On the other side, power management is not the best on FreeBSD. 4. Probably other frustrations that I have forgotten about. 5. I think many of the developers of those components are trying to reach a Mac-like experience? I am not against that in any way, but it needs to be working well. FreeBSD has here one simple advantage. It is not integrated by any means into a GUI. Those are dbus, hal, udev, udisks, upower, pulseaudio, systemd, consolekit and policykit. Said to say but these friends are also available here. They are not part of FreeBSD and some can be avoided. I am aware that those solutions are there to solve complex problems (thus their inherent complexity) and that many bright people with a lot of experience have thought about them and worked on those projects. My frustration is that those solutions are: 1. At the cost of making simple tasks more complex. 2. Replacing or conflicting with the previously existing solution. 3. Sometimes very unstable and unusable. I think you see here Linux as a distribution. Things like this are avoided with FreeBSD itself but not wit the ports. The ports have nothing much to do with FreeBSD except that they work on FreeBSD. q) Where does the FreeBSD project stand on this matter? From what I noticed is that the base system seems to adhere to the tranditional flat text files for configuration and simple tools that do a good job, leaving it up to the user to combine those small tools to create larger, more complex ones (a UNIX inheritance). I read sometime comments that people want to make it more complex. q) Is a FreeBSD stable base system with current high-level components possible? Will it avoid the issues I experienced on Linux-based systems? Yes and no. As an example. I have had to run Fedora 16 on my x220 for some reasons. I was surprised how fast it is when I moved yesterday to FreeBSD. Some of the differences have to do with the deamons as you described above. My goal I have two laptops (Asus N73JQ, Asus U36S) which I use as work machines. Power efficiency is very important, efficient disk access too. Suspend to ram and hiberation would be nice to have but are not utterly important. q) I would assume UFS with J+SU is fast enough for a laptop? I use UFS since 2004/5 on laptops. q) Does ZFS make sense on a laptop? Any advantages of using it over USF with J+SU? I am not interested in any striping or mirroring on the laptops, but the compression features is very attractive for the HDDs in the first laptop. It did not make sense for me. q) The second laptop has an SSD, would UFS with/without J and with/without SU or ZFS make more sense for it? q) Can I live with a desktop environment (Gnome or KDE) and desktop applications (Firefox, Libreoffice, etc) by relying only on packages? It should work when you start off from the release versions. q) Does
Re: New to FreeBSD - Some questions
Maybe a hint. I leave always one big release out. With other words. If you start now with 9, you do not have to move to 10 but you can stick with 9 until 11 comes out. You do not even have to upgrade at the spot. my as i do - i for now run FreeBSD 8, and will run 9 when it will be needed with new hardware (drivers) or it will have clearly noticable adventages of speed and/or functionality. I think you see here Linux as a distribution. Things like this are avoided with FreeBSD itself but not wit the ports. The ports have nothing much to do with FreeBSD except that they work on FreeBSD. repeating once again. FreeBSD base system is one complete and consistent thing. ports are another. If one run program X under linux, it will be the same program X under FreeBSD. ___ 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
Re: New to FreeBSD - Some questions
On Thu, 21 Jun 2012 13:24:26 +0200, Fred Morcos wrote: On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 9:58 PM, Wojciech Puchar woj...@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl wrote: I'm quite new to FreeBSD too (RHEL/Fedora background), and am most impressed with it so far. rather huge difference. If you use the right Linusi, you can gain lots of useful knowledge. Basics are important, and older versions of Linux can really teach them. Of course a click'n'grunt environment won't teach you much. Secondly (and probably stating the obvious), the handbook http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ is the place I always look first. and third - manuals. They are in sync with system and actually VERY useful. while i was still (long time ago) using linux most common manual was like this manual is outdated. Use texinfo documentation. and texinfo docs was often outdated too. Today it is most probably look at wikipedia ;) Of course i means FreeBSD base system, ports are not part of FreeBSD and quality varies. In modern applications, documentation is often left out (Who ever reads that?!), or it's scattered across web forums, user web pages and wikis. Some ports for FreeBSD have good manpages (e. g. man mplayer, man xmms or even man opera), some don't (try to find manpages for KDE programs, also no man firefox). I have been using GNU/Linux for quite a while and I am most comfortable with Archlinux. That should have provided you with essential basic knowledge that you can apply in FreeBSD without problems. The reason I like it is it's simplicity from the ground up without wasting too much time on unimportant details (unless you want to). You will find that aspect in FreeBSD. Another strong point is that it provides binary packages by default, user-building of packages if you want to, and the same level of customization you can achieve with - say - Gentoo Linux. FreeBSD seems to provide that. FreeBSD offers two methods: Source-based or precompiled. Both of them are build from the ports collection, a kind of means to control dealing with sources and automatically build from them. I learned over the years that (re-)compilation of packages is not something I want to do regularly, but something I would like to do only when I need and want to (ie, to strip out or add a certain compile-time feature from/to a package). A prominent example is mplayer / mencoder to deal with codecs. It's also typically needed to build OpenOffice with non-US language and unusual settings like no integration with KDE or Gnome (if you're not using them). I also learned that the performance gains of tuning compiler flags for a certain CPU are not that drastic for a desktop/laptop/workstation machine workflow and that this category of computing is mostly bound by IO speed (especially with HDDs). It's only needed when you have to get things running on older hardware. Again, mplayer is a good example for where you intendedly would deal with compiling in such a constellation. q) Is it possible to run a FreeBSD system without much building? In other words, can I survive by depending on packages and only resorting to ports when really needed? It is. You're basically using pkg_add -r name to install the packages you want. The required dependencies will automatically be installed. What set me off, and got me tired of dealing with Linux-based systems is a set of patterns that have been repeating over for some years now. Generally: 1. Too often, core system components break (especially with every Linux kernel release). They don't in FreeBSD. Only tested and verified modifications will be committed to the non-experimental branches (the security branch of -RELEASE, and the -STABLE branch). If you're following the experimental development branch -HEAD, it _might_ happen that the system doesn't even compile, but updated 30 minutes after that accident, it runs fine again. :-) 1. Yesterday I spent 30 minutes until my webcam worked, dealing with v4l, gstreamer and cheese. FreeBSD - unlike Linux! - has a differentiation between the OS (FreeBSD itself, the operating system) and 3rd party applications (everything else, the ports collection). Even if you mess up all your ports, you _never_ will end up with a defective OS. So even in such a worst case, you can still access system means for diagnostics and repair. 2. Sudden drastic changes that are deviating from simplicity. 1. The sudden flood of daemons that are designed to do everything for me, without giving me much say in the matter. My computer is supposed to help me, not decide for me or replace me. The concept of FreeBSD includes to have several system-level deamons available, but only few of them are running by default. You have to enable them if you feel you need them. This is done in centralized (!) system configuration files. The most important one is /etc/rc.conf. Did I already mention
Re: New to FreeBSD - Some questions
the experimental development branch -HEAD, it _might_ happen that the system doesn't even compile, but updated 30 minutes after that accident, it runs fine again. :-) And finally unless doing tests or using private not-really-important computer, don't just install newest FreeBSD because it's out. I - and lot of others - still use 8.* for production while 9.* is out already for some time. Anyway i think that bleeding edge -HEAD release is still more stable than stable linux kernel. q) I would assume UFS with J+SU is fast enough for a laptop? I think so. For a laptop, you _might_ consider adding encryption. Just in case. You never know. for a server - you MUST do this :) q) The second laptop has an SSD, would UFS with/without J and with/without SU or ZFS make more sense for it? There are several parameters that you can tweak (see man tunefs), I would suggest a single partition spanning the whole SSD, and journaling would not be contraproductive. s/would not/would/ i assume this as mistake. do not journal on SSD. it increases amount of writes, and fsck is quick anyway. do not forget of -t option with newfs (TRIM enable) ___ 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
Re: New to FreeBSD - Some questions
Hi, On Thursday 21 June 2012 23:55:38 Polytropon wrote: On Thu, 21 Jun 2012 13:24:26 +0200, Fred Morcos wrote: On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 9:58 PM, Wojciech Puchar q) Is it possible to get native resolution on the console? I played with vesa and vidcontrol but could never get what I wanted. Native resolution would require KMS? As far as I know, KMS (kernel mode settings) is specific to Linux. past tense, please. FreeBSD has several VESA modes bigger than 80x25. But I have to admit that I don't see a problem in using this default mode during initialization time. Later on, xterms (also those containing SSH and screen sessions) can be configured any size under X. Not really. I never found out why PCBSD could use my 1366x768 screen under VESA but FreeBSD couldn't. The new KMS does it all. Erich ___ 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
Re: New to FreeBSD - Some questions
On Thu, 21 Jun 2012 19:14:54 +0200 (CEST), Wojciech Puchar wrote: the experimental development branch -HEAD, it _might_ happen that the system doesn't even compile, but updated 30 minutes after that accident, it runs fine again. :-) And finally unless doing tests or using private not-really-important computer, don't just install newest FreeBSD because it's out. I - and lot of others - still use 8.* for production while 9.* is out already for some time. For home desktops, usually -STABLE is a good solution. Server maintainers tend to use -RELEASE-pX (which also makes binary updates easier). q) I would assume UFS with J+SU is fast enough for a laptop? I think so. For a laptop, you _might_ consider adding encryption. Just in case. You never know. for a server - you MUST do this :) It's worth mentioning that it's not good practice to have a keyfile-based decryption which is unlocked by a USB stick permanently sticking in the server. Security is nearly zero in such a constellation. Passphrase-based decryption is good as long as you have physical access to the server and only you (and maybe those you trust) have a secure (!!!) password which needs to be entered manually at system startup to unlock the /home drive or partition. q) The second laptop has an SSD, would UFS with/without J and with/without SU or ZFS make more sense for it? There are several parameters that you can tweak (see man tunefs), I would suggest a single partition spanning the whole SSD, and journaling would not be contraproductive. s/would not/would/ i assume this as mistake. do not journal on SSD. it increases amount of writes, and fsck is quick anyway. Good you spotted it - of course there is no need for journaling in this case (too much writes, no real benefit). -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ... ___ 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
Re: New to FreeBSD - Some questions
Hi, On Wednesday 20 June 2012 19:32:24 Fred Morcos wrote: I am new to FreeBSD, coming from a GNU/Linux background (most comfortable with Archlinux). I compiled a series of questions I would like to ask in different areas and categories. Should I send them all in a single email message or should I split them by subject/topic into different emails? whatever you will be doing, some will say that it is wrong. The advantage of the former is that I will be able to easily show relations between the different topics and questions (put them into context) as well as articulate the setup I would like to reach. The advantage of the latter is that it is cleaner and simpler to answer one question by one. Also, I have done a bit of poking around to answer each of my own questions, obviously with no luck, so I do not mind RTFM-ing - I would actually prefer it, please feel free to link me to an article, tutorial, man page or handbook that already answers one or more question(s). I think that it is the best to ask. If people get disturbed by your questions, they should ignore it. The majority will be keen to help. You have choosen the general list. In case you cannot get an answer to a specific question, you can still post the same question later on the specific mailing list. Just be practical. Erich ___ 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
Re: New to FreeBSD - Some questions
I am new to FreeBSD, coming from a GNU/Linux background (most comfortable with Archlinux). I compiled a series of questions I would like to ask in different areas and categories. Should I send them all in a single email message or should I split them by subject/topic into different emails? split. or you will end with enormous messy thread. ___ 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
Re: New to FreeBSD - Some questions
On Wed, 20 Jun 2012 14:32:24 +0200, Fred Morcos wrote: Hello all, I am new to FreeBSD, coming from a GNU/Linux background (most comfortable with Archlinux). I compiled a series of questions I would like to ask in different areas and categories. Should I send them all in a single email message or should I split them by subject/topic into different emails? The advantage of the former is that I will be able to easily show relations between the different topics and questions (put them into context) as well as articulate the setup I would like to reach. The advantage of the latter is that it is cleaner and simpler to answer one question by one. Also, I have done a bit of poking around to answer each of my own questions, obviously with no luck, so I do not mind RTFM-ing - I would actually prefer it, please feel free to link me to an article, tutorial, man page or handbook that already answers one or more question(s). I'm quite new to FreeBSD too (RHEL/Fedora background), and am most impressed with it so far. The first thing to mention is that this is an extremely helpful list (I won't call it a newsgroup because it isn't one, though I read it via gmane), and as such is most useful. Ask away! Secondly (and probably stating the obvious), the handbook http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ is the place I always look first. Good luck! ___ 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
Re: New to FreeBSD - Some questions
These are good guidelines to follow: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/freebsd-questions/article.html Try to avoid X Y problems. Initiating it with the root question will give the best results. On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 7:32 AM, Fred Morcos fred.mor...@gmail.com wrote: Hello all, I am new to FreeBSD, coming from a GNU/Linux background (most comfortable with Archlinux). I compiled a series of questions I would like to ask in different areas and categories. Should I send them all in a single email message or should I split them by subject/topic into different emails? The advantage of the former is that I will be able to easily show relations between the different topics and questions (put them into context) as well as articulate the setup I would like to reach. The advantage of the latter is that it is cleaner and simpler to answer one question by one. Also, I have done a bit of poking around to answer each of my own questions, obviously with no luck, so I do not mind RTFM-ing - I would actually prefer it, please feel free to link me to an article, tutorial, man page or handbook that already answers one or more question(s). Cheers, Fred ___ 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 -- Adam Vande More ___ 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
Re: New to FreeBSD - Some questions
I'm quite new to FreeBSD too (RHEL/Fedora background), and am most impressed with it so far. rather huge difference. Secondly (and probably stating the obvious), the handbook http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ is the place I always look first. and third - manuals. They are in sync with system and actually VERY useful. while i was still (long time ago) using linux most common manual was like this manual is outdated. Use texinfo documentation. and texinfo docs was often outdated too. Today it is most probably look at wikipedia ;) Of course i means FreeBSD base system, ports are not part of FreeBSD and quality varies. ___ 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
