JRRZZ blog

I thought with all the Linux experience I’ve got it might be fun to start playing with one of the BSD style operating systems. So I got my old slot machine (sic) and built the Pentium II board into a casing I stole form my brother. It’s an old system. VIA based, ATA/66, ATI Rage on AGP and a simple Realtek 8139 PCI NIC. I thougt this would be the ideal system to play around with. I mean, the hardware is supported by GNU/Linux based operating systems for ages so it shouldn’t be a problem for the Berkely Software Distribution, right? Because it was an old system I ran some I/O and RAM tests first to make sure this would be fair. Like all of my hardware; it passed all the tests without a glitch.

Because a friend of my brother’s has got puffy tattooed on his right shoulder I gave OpenBSD 4.0 a spin first. The installation procedure was a bit old school but manageable. Especially partitioning took some getting used to. Wooh, a root shell. Now, let’s try to get a DHCP lease. No NIC. It should support the NIC out of the box but rd0 seemed null. Ok, without network there’s plenty of OpenBSD goodness to explore, eh, I guess. The entire system reminded me of my Linux 2.2 on Slack days. I guess I’m just spoiled with my modern GNU environment I call $HOME. The default OpenBSD install offers only the bare minimum. Documentation was ok in quality but scarce. With the documentation I got with the OpenBSD install CD I managed to get the system running, but that’s it. To be honest, I didn’t feel at home. It felt like a tightly secured concrete cell I had to live in and I had to build my home in that cell from scratch. I wasn’t feeling like going all Gentoo today so I quickly halted the OS. Afterwards my system didn’t want to boot anymore. I don’t know what I’ve done wrong but OpenBSD didn’t boot anymore. I think without a guide me and OpenBSD will never be friends.

On to the next one, the one in the spotlight everyone is talking about; FreeBSD 6.2. Documentation is really well done here and it really looks like a finished product. The installation was smooth and menu driven. FreeBSD was friendly and gentle to my system. I actually had high hopes for this one. Until after my package selection. Page fault. It also printed that it couldn’t find a device to dump it’s debug info on. But somehow it did find a device to tell me it couldn’t find a device. Weird. There was simply no way I got back into the system. It gave me two choices; halt or reboot. It rebooted and started telling me it couldn’t find /kernel. Well duh. I guess this is the second time I’ve had bad luck with FreeBSD. Lots of people at Interlink seem to be able to work with it just fine. Maybe I’ll try again on a different box someday.

Finally, the third one of the big three. NetBSD 3.1. The documentation was mediocre but sufficient. The CD booted just fine and the installation (using sysint) was a blast. Really, this is one of the best installers, next to the Debian installer of course, I’ve seen so far. It didn’t detect my 200GB HDD but that’s probably because the old BIOS has never seen disks this big. Luckily it offered a manual disk config utility. After a reboot it booted into a clean UNIX. Nothing fancy but exactly what you would expect. Network was working out of the box, all my harware was supported. Even X worked right away. I’ve decided I want to keep NetBSD to play around with some more. I have to get a decent text editor first, I simply can’t stand vi. My goal is to make it into a nice lightweight BSD X workstation. I sure need to read alot of documentation before I can start using it like I use my Linux boxes right now, but I guess it’ll be worth it.

So. The day is over. I’ve got a NetBSD 3.1 box to play around with. Congratulations, NetBSD. Maybe we’ll become friends someday.

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