Hari's Corner

Continuing from my previous entry, it's been a week since I've been using FreeBSD now and I can say that in many aspects it feels a better OS than Linux, particularly the base system tools, the devfs system, the /etc/rc.conf interface to system initialization, the kernel module loading through /boot/loader.conf etc. are very convenient and easy to use.

Having said that I strongly suspect that Linux users will find a few gotchas in FreeBSD. Here I will document some of the problems that a "power" desktop user will face in FreeBSD as compared to Linux.

Gnome and KDE issues

Though the common desktop environments, Gnome and KDE work well, it is to be realized that they require some integration with the base hardware for some functionality. 90% of this will work on FreeBSD through HAL and DBus, but there will be quirks. Some Gnome tools do not work as expected or work with reduced functionality: in particular third-party Gnome components which assume a Linux installation.

Without getting too much into detail, if all you want is a desktop with the basic productivity tools, things will work reasonably as expected. However some system configuration GUI tools will not work properly or at all.

Bluetooth support might also be tricky in FreeBSD; at least it will not work through the Gnome bluetooth interface.

3D acceleration for display drivers

FreeBSD does have 3D drivers from NVIDIA (not sure about AMD) but until recently there was no support for x86-64 (commonly known as amd64). But in any case this is not so big an issue if all you play is low-intensive SDL games and don't rely on OpenGL applications.

The sound system - this is my biggest gotcha

Most likely your sound card will work and be supported by FreeBSD, but where the problem lies is in using some common sound and multimedia applications which absolutely rely on ALSA. Now it is well known that FreeBSD and other BSDs continue to use the Open Sound System, while modern Linux kernels prefer ALSA. This means that if you are used to certain multimedia applications that rely on ALSA you're on your own.

90% of sound-related apps work on both OSS and ALSA, but MIDI and music composition tools like Rosegarden and NoteEdit aren't available on FreeBSD as they use ALSA MIDI interface, not OSS. Having said that JACK is available in FreeBSD and applications that use JACK audio toolkit will work nicely.

Hardware and peripherals

This article, which seems to appear on google search results for "FreeBSD for Linux users" is a bit outdated and does not take into account the increasing number and variety of hardware and peripheral devices especially for mobile computing.

He says "most common hardware that is supported in Linux should be supported in FreeBSD" and you will be affected only if you *own* that piece of hardware which is not supported. Now for desktop systems this might hold true, but as many of us use laptops, I can confidently say that Linux support for laptop hardware would definitely be on a higher level because of the sheer number of people who use a variety of hardware on Linux and the fact that some of them have the technical capability to write device drivers. The FreeBSD community is simply not large enough to care about certain uncommonly used peripheral devices while Linux has a much better and wider support for uncommon peripherals like webcams and certain USB input devices like WizardPen-based pen tablets.

While input devices like pen tablets require an Xorg driver which might be available on Linux, not all of them are easily portable to FreeBSD as some of them rely on Linux kernel calls. Webcams are a different issue and you won't be able to use most internal or external webcams which Linux supports using the uvc (USB video class) drivers.

Again, some wireless cards might not be supported, but this is becoming less and less of an issue these days.

Conclusion

On the whole this is not a discussion on pros and cons of FreeBSD but merely issues which Linux desktop users have to be aware of before they think of using FreeBSD full time.

This is probably going to be a series of short notes on my FreeBSD 8.0 installation. This is more a personal reference rather than a full-fledged guide, but I hope some people will benefit from it. Use the FreeBSD handbook as your main source of information.

Note 1: that this is a desktop user's perspective.

Note 2: I've simplified a lot of this because I did have to struggle to find out a few tricks. That's why I am documenting this now.

Initial Configuration and Setting up the Boot Loader

After the FreeBSD installation, I was left with a non-booting system as I chose not to install the FreeBSD loader in the MBR. However, the GRUB super disk came to the rescue and I was able to boot Vista no problem.

Then I downloaded and installed EasyBCD, a GUI configurator for the Vista boot manager and that way I restored the MBR to a working state.

Setting up the default user

I added the newly created normal user to the group "wheel". This is a great convenience factor as I can su as root whenever I want. For this I edited the /etc/groups file and found the line:

wheel:*:0:root

and added the user as follows:

wheel:*:0:root,myname

(Note that there should be no space between the commas.

Networking and hostname setup

Since I added a default network, I wanted to avoid the long delay on boot which occurs when you're not connected to a network. To this end, I appended my hostname to the loopback IP 127.0.0.1 /etc/hosts.

Also in /etc/rc.conf I disabled MTA, by added a line

sendmail_enable="NONE"

This speeded up the boot process quite a bit.

Xorg and GDM setup

After generating the initial X configuration file, using X -configure I noticed that the mouse and keyboard wouldn't work with the setup. I edited out the keyboard and mouse devices section and added this in the serverlayout:

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier     "X.org Configured"
        Screen         0  "Screen0" 0 0
        Option      "AutoAddDevices" "True"
        Option         "AutoEnableDevices" "True"
EndSection

Having configured Xorg successfully I wanted to load GDM automatically on boot. To make Gnome and GDM work properly, I had to edit the /etc/rc.conf file and add these lines:

dbus_enable="YES"
gnome_enable="YES"
powerd_enable="YES"
gdm_enable="YES"

powerd is necessary for ACPI functionality to work properly. Also without hal and dbus Gnome won't work properly.

For shutdown and reboot to work, add this line to /etc/fstab:

proc    /proc    procfs   rw    0       0

Now shutdown and reboot should work from within GDM.

Sound and wireless networking

To make wireless and sound work, I had to dig a bit into the FreeBSD handbook and wireless proved to be quite a nuisance until I realized that I had to create a wlan0 interface. My laptop has the Intel 3945ABG which uses the if_wpi FreeBSD driver and requires the wpifw firmware as well.

I enabled the kernel support for wireless and sound by editing /boot/loader.conf:

legal.intel_wpi.license_ack=1
wpifw_load="YES"
if_wpi_load="YES"
wlan_scan_ap_load="YES"
wlan_scan_sta_load="YES"
firmware_load="YES"
wlan_amrr_load="YES"
pci_load="YES"
wlan_wep_load="YES"
wlan_tkip_load="YES"
wlan_ccmp_load="YES"
snd_driver_load="YES"

(I realize that I probably don't need all of that and some of them will be loaded as dependencies.)

Now since I use WPA-PSK encryption I created the /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file as follows:

network={
  ssid="mySSID"
  psk="myPassPhrase"
}

Then I added these line in /etc/rc.conf to automatically run wpa_supplicant and configure the interface:

wlans_wpi0="wlan0"
ifconfig_wlan0="WPA DHCP"

I struggled with the above bit as directly using the wpi0 interface failed and I had no clue how to resolve it.

So far it's been quite hard and as you can see it's not as friendly as modern Linux distributions. FreeBSD makes very little assumptions about your default setup and simply dumps you into a *nix shell when you first log in. Everything from there is what you know.

The journey is by no means complete as I still have to install my software and see if I can set up everything else the way I want to as in Linux. Whether I am successful or not will be documented in part 2 of this.

FreeBSD is not for the faint-hearted.

A random piece of news that I recently stumbled upon was the fact that Blogger recently removed their FTP support, essentially ending an era of "hosted" blogs (blogs which were generated through the Blogger.com service but served from the blog author's own hosting/server). This is just another reason why I am glad I never used their blogging service in the first place.

To be fair, google have provided a migration service for such users. However this news must be hard to take for all those people who have relied on Blogger's FTP service all these years. While the actual number of people who used the FTP service might be a miniscule fraction, I think that this just shows the arbitrariness of free services on the Internet and the implications of sudden policy changes on their part.

Mmm... I had one today. The divine taste of a good old Cassata ice cream features in my version of heaven. It's my favourite kind of dessert when I dine out, but it is not commonly available in a lot of restaurants and the regular ice-cream shops don't have these.

I don't know how popular they are outside India and in what variants they are available but I know that I cannot have enough of this. What I especially like is the crispy layer of cake merged with the icecream and all those bits and pieces of nuts and fruity bits. The best part is the fruity flavour that's left in the mouth afterwards.

There seems to be one variant that I can fathom: the one featuring the cake predominantly. According to Wikipedia it's Italian sweet and I guess the ice-cream evolved from that.

Papa Hari News Service

A snake, a full-grown adult male of the Naja Naja (Indian Cobra) family, which claimed that human beings potrayed reptiles as evil, slimy and undesirable creatures in movies and the media today took the exceptional step of filing a defamation suit on behalf of the entire reptile family in the Papa Hari High Court of Justice. Talking, or rather hissing to news reporters, the snake claimed that the portrayal of snakes in movies amounted to racial discrimination and bias.

"Why are we portrayed as evil and hss... ssslimy?" hissed he, "I hssss.. sssee thissss as defamatory and an insstance of racial dissss-crimination."

Meanwhile crocodiles and other members of the broad family of reptiles came out in open support of the aforementioned snake. "At least snakes have an aura of mystery about them," complained the croc, "But crocodiles are portrayed as outright despicable and nasty with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. This has to stop!"

Many television and movie producers were shocked at this development and were quick to dismiss the racial discrimination charge. "How can we discriminate racially against snakes and other reptiles. On what basis is the charge made? Skin colour or texture? Lack of warmth of blood? Or what? Let them go lay their blooming eggs!" screamed a movie producer whose recent movie featured a haunted house and a snake which was supposed to stalk and terrorize any inhabitant of the place.

"It's well known that snakes are timid and docile creatures," said a prominent animal rights activist, "We should embrace them as members of Nature's family!" When asked whether this was sound and prudent advice, the activist hastily added, "I meant figuratively, not literally! You don't want to harm a snake by hugging it." When pointed out that there was a good chance that the snake might attack or bite the person indulging in such an activity the activist pondered for a while and retorted, "Oh, that too!"

Meanwhile a low budget children's magazine which features such prominent characters as Rajashekhar Snake, Kandaswamy Monkey, Ezhumalai Lion and Murugan Crocodile quickly decided to change all its animal characters into human beings; not a difficult task since the aforementioned animals were attributed human qualities in the first place. "We simply dropped the animal references from the character names. The rest of the story is left unchanged. Only somebody has to redraw all the characters", said the editor of the magazine, sighing as one who gives up a long running tradition.

"Simply put, snakes don't hunt down human beings for the fun of it, nor do they seek revenge or smell out clothes and attack its owner; they cannot hear and listen to instructions from the sorcerer and so on and so forth," said the lawyer representing the snake, in a vague reference to a popular Tamil daily soap where such events as bulls attacking people specifically wearing red clothes and snakes being set on a scent of a human being from their clothes and relentlessly hunting down the owner of the clothes were recent storylines. "If you leave them alone, they just mind their own business."

In the meantime, the snake also assured that they were launching a new educational forum to remove misconceptions and other incorrect notions about snakes in general. When pointed out that such channels as National Geographic, Animal Planet and Discovery already provided such education, the snake merely hissed in derision.