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Date:      Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:34:15 +0200
From:      Lars Engels <lme@FreeBSD.org>
To:        rsidd120@gmail.com
Cc:        freebsd-chat@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Questions on FreeBSD today
Message-ID:  <20080709163415.sqz7ibbvj4cgkoso@0x20.net>
In-Reply-To: <6a506d980807090304i1b7bde5ah66fcc9690b7b0f1e@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <6a506d980807090304i1b7bde5ah66fcc9690b7b0f1e@mail.gmail.com>

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Quoting Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd120@gmail.com>:

> I've been away from FreeBSD for a few years -- I briefly gave
> 7.0-CURRENT a spin last year, on an old laptop, but didn't
> stick with it.   However, I'll likely be getting a new laptop soon
> and I'm tired of linux (and especially tired of Ubuntu, which
> thinks it's smarter than me.)
>
> So I'm seriously considering FreeBSD 7.  On the plus side, I've
> done quite a lot of C programming (though not system-level)
> since I last used FreeBSD, so I can try some hackery if I need to.
> On the minus side, I don't want to spend all my time fixing ports
> or patching device drivers -- I'd rather have a system that just
> works, and lets me focus on my work.  Anyway, I have a  few
> questions:
>
> 1. My biggest peeve was the tendency to crash when pulling
>    out USB memory sticks (especially if they were mounted,
>    but sometimes even if they were unmounted).  Kris Kennaway
>    told me in a private mail that this has been fixed in 8-CURRENT.
>    Is that so, and has it been MFC'd?

Yes, that's fixed in CURRENT. I don't know if it is / will be merged =20
back to STABLE.

> 3. How good is Wine on FreeBSD?  Can I expect it to be almost
>   as good as Wine on Linux?

It is not as good as Wine on Linux, but it's pretty good already. I =20
use it from time to time.

> 5. Do linux binaries that require ALSA (eg, flash plugin 9/10)
>   work?

There's a very buggy port of flash 9 which crashes you browser _but_ =20
as you like to use wine, you can just run Windows Firefox with Flash =20
plugin 9/10 without problems.

>
> 6. Can I run Windows Vista (likely to be preinstalled -- no
>   choice) under Xen or qemu?

Sorry, no support for Xen yet. AFAIK there is some work ongoing to get =20
VirtualBox running on FreeBSD, but I don't know the current status. =20
qemu runs nicely with kqemu-kmod. I don't know if you can run Vista =20
with it. I heard that XP doesn't run too fast with it but can be usable.

> 7. How good is power management, in particular cpufreq
>   and ACPI suspend-to-RAM?  (I suppose the answer depends
>   on the laptop model.)

You are right here. It depends on the model. There are some problems =20
which prevent multi-core machines to resume after suspend, so you'd =20
need to disable all but one core.

FreeBSD is a great system, but you hit some of its weak spots here. ;-)

Lars

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