Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2002 10:49:28 -0700 (PDT) From: Matthew Jacob <mjacob@feral.com> To: current@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD 5.0 as a desktop 'failure' report Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0209140940100.40126-100000@beppo>
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I spent, on and off, 10 days trying to replace my current -stable desktop/test machine with a -current one- I've now given up and gone back to -stable, but my experience/needs may not be typical. 1. First 'problems'- installation funnies The *relatively* easy part was to install from the DP1 CD ROM image. That is, the installer is the same as it always has been- mostly works pretty good. The first desktop system I tred this on was a 400MHz 440LX+ system (20GB ATA disk based, fxp onboard, but an ATI RAGE 128 as an add in graphics card). The first install failed because the BIOS and FreeBSD couldn't agree on disk geometry. Then I laid the disk out with inadequate space in /usr partition- my 'pilot' error really. The second install went much better. After cvs updatining ports and src, I was able to get a buildworld/installworld done w/o problems. However, the kernel I built out of sources as of about the beginning of last week would never finish boot probing. After trying multitudes of combinations of disabling ACPI loading, AGP loading, updating, etc., I guessed that it might be because I had, essentially, 2 VGA cards (there was no way to disable the onboard VGA- but the BIOS allowed you to choose whether you would use the PCI or onboard as the system display). Because I really want my desktop to have a decent card, I discarded the LX system (now to possibly become a bench test system) and went to another system. 2. Second 'problems'- more h/w fun && games I swapped in a a 667MHz PIII Dell Latitude. That worked peachy, *except* that the RocketPort card and USB enabled would wedge the machines. Tra La- more PC fun and games- disabling USB worked here.. 3. Third 'problems'- but I need *graphics* I felt I was ready to rock && roll at this point... *but*... No window system was on DP1, so I would have to use ports to get one... Hmmm- pkg_add -r of XFree86_4 got bus errors and core dumped. Okay! Well, let's *build* it.... that worked.... took a while, but worked.. .....Far out- XFree86 correctly sized the monitor and gave me a 1920x1440 desktop -swell! But we need a window manager- let's build gnome2! That worked- but, haha, gnome2 refused to run because it failed to be able to do NFS locking on my NFS mounted (on a Solaris 8 server) home directory. Oh, well that's really not going to cut it now, is it.... Oh, well, let's live with plain sawfish until we sort this one out... 4. Killer 'problem'- *sputter*... So- this had been my desktop/lab-controller system- that is, my desktop, *plus* a RocketPort 8 to control serial consoles for a bunch of bench machines next to my desk. In 5.0-current, the rp driver is unable to sustain 9600 baud of input w/o dropping at least 25% of the input characters. That made the system unusable for the purpose I'd been (easily) using it before. When I put this together with the fact that I had now spent over a week trying to get my desktop back (in the interim I'd been using a Linux RH7.3 install over in the corner)- I decided to punt and drop back to RELENG_4. After a day of foollng around, I'm back to a fully functional FreeBSD system as my desktop. 5. Discussion Now - the week of time is not really a week of time *devoted* to installing 5.0. It was a week of trying to get work done and interleaving that with maybe 20% duty cycle of moving various installation issues along with my 'previous' deskstop system. But this is what people in the real world do- they have to get work done and any admin task that they have to do and can't spin off to some lab grunt that takes longer than a couple of hours is going to get that kind of attention- and the product will get short shrift if the effort and time ends up being wasted. I could have done a more formal test here- but Murray had asked us to please *try* 5.0 as our desktop at least (as opposed to the server stuff which I've been doing all along)- so I decided to oblige him and give it a whirl, as a casual customer, say- with disappointing results. I believe that I didn't have really broken or odd hardware. The RocketPort may be a bit unusual- but the booting issues with a 440LX+ really shouldn't have happened. I suppose that by the time 5.0 makes it a CD for a real release, there will be a fully functional window system- but the lack of an ability to right now, have something 'just work' -even if *suboptimally*- makes this something for the "Not Recommended' CR category. Now- I'm just mentioning this as my experience- I'm not mailing this to start a big flame war- if everyone wants to say that my experience was just an edge case, that'd be fine. I feel I've done due diligence to *try* 5.0 as a desktop: It's not ready for me at least. -matt To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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