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Thread: Installing FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE

  1. #11
    Just Another Geek
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    Quote Originally Posted by gore
    Wasn't the Amiga 1000 the machine that had that amazing GUI? It looked like a mix of Mac OS and IRIX and I always kind of liked that look of it.
    Yep, it could render 4096 colors out of the full 16.7 million pallet at a time when PCs only had 16 colors. It also had (or rather has) a 32 bit pre-emptive multitasking OS when Windows was still stuck with a mix of 8, 16 and 32 bit code and cooperative multitasking.

    Quote Originally Posted by gore
    Well, the thing about FreeBSD is that some Linux programs RUN FASTER in FreeBSD. Which makes no sense of course since, well, they're being Emulated.
    Well, it's not exactly emulated. What it does is 'convert' a Linux Kernel ABI call to the respective FreeBSD Kernel ABI call. So it's actually a full-on ABI implementation, not an emulation.

    Everything else, keep it up
    Oliver's Law:
    Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.

  2. #12
    Senior Member gore's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by SirDice View Post
    Yep, it could render 4096 colors out of the full 16.7 million pallet at a time when PCs only had 16 colors. It also had (or rather has) a 32 bit pre-emptive multitasking OS when Windows was still stuck with a mix of 8, 16 and 32 bit code and cooperative multitasking.
    Wow, that's right! Windows had Coop Multi Tasking.... God I can't think of one person who thinks that's a good idea...I'm not sure why Microsoft, who was already getting bad press for their products, would use a type of Multi Tasking that more or less sucks. Letting Applications do what they want and control anything, is a bad idea.

    But anyway, I think it was like 7 years ago or so, I was looking up some Operating System stuff, and happened to come across some older ones on old machines, and I saw an Amiga.

    I admit I was surprised to see it, I mean, I knew they existed, but I sure didn't know how neat the Interface looked. I think it was an Amiga 1000 I saw (It seems familiar for some reason) and the GUI it has and overall look is nice.



    Well, it's not exactly emulated. What it does is 'convert' a Linux Kernel ABI call to the respective FreeBSD Kernel ABI call. So it's actually a full-on ABI implementation, not an emulation.
    Ahh, thanks. I wasn't exactly positive how that worked, and I sure wasn't going to ramble on about it much when I wasn't even sure. I tend to just go over something a small amount if I don't know for sure what it is, and when it comes to OS Emulation, or to OS translation / whatever, I'm not an expert.

    Everything else, keep it up
    Thanks As one of the few actual BSD users we have here, that means a lot

  3. #13
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Hi gore,

    What would be YOUR recommendations as to minimum hardware specs? and what would you say would be "comfortable"?

    Also // a bit off topic?

    A mate of mine and myself have been having this discussion regarding multicore processors. He has 3 AMD dual cores and runs XP Pro.

    How does this distro handle multicores? //

    For myself, I have 2 boxes I might try:

    IBM PIII/533 with 512MB SDRAM and a PII/450 with 384MB SDRAM.......... any chance?


  4. #14
    Senior Member gore's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by nihil View Post
    Hi gore,

    What would be YOUR recommendations as to minimum hardware specs? and what would you say would be "comfortable"?

    Also // a bit off topic?

    A mate of mine and myself have been having this discussion regarding multicore processors. He has 3 AMD dual cores and runs XP Pro.

    How does this distro handle multicores? //

    For myself, I have 2 boxes I might try:

    IBM PIII/533 with 512MB SDRAM and a PII/450 with 384MB SDRAM.......... any chance?

    A Minimum system on FreeBSD? Heh, they still have versions for a 386 around. Outdated I admit, but it works from what I've read. A 486 of course is going to get you slightly more, and as far as I know, the latest still runs fine on that too.

    A Minimum that would be at least usable though... Hmm:

    Without X - 486.

    With X as a GUI running the minimum is going to be a little higher because even though X can run on a 386 or a 486, that's like a minimum, and that means lagging to crap.

    However, in my own experience, I have a machine like I've said before to you, that has a 433 MHz Celeron Processor, and 192 MBs of RAM, and I had not only Slackware, but FreeBSD installed on that, and I got it running KDE 4, and even though it was a little slow, I was incredibly shocked to see that it would run it at all, and also, it ran it decently.

    I mean KDE 4, has a lot of eye candy, and I thought it would be laggy, and slow, and even though it wasn't exactly fast with response time, it was usable.

    But for a minimum, running something like maybe Window Maker, or FVWM, this is going to allow you to use even older hardware, and not have so much lag.

    I mean KDE 3.5 is still around, but KDE in general, goes for making things pretty, and being more of a Desktop system, and Gnome is about the same. It's going to look like Windows or Mac OS X, and have system requirements more suited for a more powerful machine. Now, I haven't ever seen Mac OS X or Windows 7 run on hardware like a 433 MHz Celeron, so I don't know how that would work out, but KDE 4, with all the eye candy, DID run alright on it.

    But, if you want me to tell you something more bare minimum that's still usable, I'd say a Pentium 2 or even a Pentium that has like 133 MHz going, and like 64 MBs of RAM, you'd probably do just fine with that if you run Window Maker, or FVWM.

    FVWM is something I personally use on multiple machines, including my Pentium 4 M Laptop with 512 MBs of RAM. It's super fast, responsive, and doesn't get in the way. Window Maker, I Love. I use Window Maker all the time. And it's nice looking, and very much usable.

    You could probably use EITHER one of the machines you listed, and be more than fine with it. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that with FreeBSD, and Window Maker or FVWM, you could probably get by with a lot less than the machines you listed.

    They just don't really need much. So basically, either one of those machines you listed as tying, will be fine. I'm not even sure what a bare minimum would be where it's still usable, because the slowest machine I have is that Celeron that runs at 433 MHz, and it only has 192 MBs of RAM, and it ran REALLY well with Window Maker. I even had Firefox loaded on Window Maker, and had NO problems.

    So basically, I don't have a machine slow enough to really slow down BSD.

    I'd say either one of those you try will be MORE than enough. SirDice is a BSD user as well, so maybe he's got a few slower machines he can talk about here. But I don't have any slow enough to really press it with BSD.

    Just do this once you have it installed:

    pkg_add -r windowmaker xorg gdm

    Maybe a few others. Just run that as root, and you'll have those installed.

    http://www.freebsd.org/ports/categories-grouped.html

    That's the Ports Collection, and you can look over those and see what you want installed.

  5. #15
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    I recently ditched a lot of old machines, mostly pentium 90 type machines. They did run FreeBSD without any issues but they were taking up a bit too much space.

    Currently my oldest machine is a P2-350MHz with 256MB of memory. Runs FreeBSD-8 perfectly but I don't run any X on there. Should still be possible though.

    As for lightweight, I'm playing around with LXDE now. Looks very promising but parts still seem to crash every now and then (especially the filemanager).
    Oliver's Law:
    Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.

  6. #16
    Senior Member gore's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by SirDice View Post
    I recently ditched a lot of old machines, mostly pentium 90 type machines. They did run FreeBSD without any issues but they were taking up a bit too much space.

    Currently my oldest machine is a P2-350MHz with 256MB of memory. Runs FreeBSD-8 perfectly but I don't run any X on there. Should still be possible though.

    As for lightweight, I'm playing around with LXDE now. Looks very promising but parts still seem to crash every now and then (especially the filemanager).
    90s? Hmm, although I have no personal experience with anything that far down, I'm going to take a guess that had you tried, FVWM and Window Maker both would have worked fine on those.

    The Pentium 2, heh, I'd say you could even get KDE working on that if you really wanted, but FVWM and Window Maker should both run great on it.

    I've used LXDE before too. It's pretty nice looking. I personally like Window Maker and Enlightenment, and have had both running on older machines.

  7. #17
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    @gore and Sir Dice:

    Thanks for the advice guys, and I now have live ammo............burnt the CD and DVD

    I guess I will have to use a brane and oppozabl thum.............. I found some new old stuff.

    A PI/150 and a PII/266.................I guess that is somewhere where you were saying you couldn't try gore?

    I need to use a screwdriver to shift the 30GB 7200 from the PI/150 to the PII/450

    Put one of the 10GB 5400s from the PII/450 to the PI/150

    And then the other 10GB to the PII/266.............It has two drives........the 2.1 goes out, and a 10 comes in with the 8.4.

    Looks like an interesting weekend?

    So, when it doesn't work............who shall I blame

  8. #18
    Senior Member gore's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by nihil View Post
    @gore and Sir Dice:

    Thanks for the advice guys, and I now have live ammo............burnt the CD and DVD

    I guess I will have to use a brane and oppozabl thum.............. I found some new old stuff.

    A PI/150 and a PII/266.................I guess that is somewhere where you were saying you couldn't try gore?

    I need to use a screwdriver to shift the 30GB 7200 from the PI/150 to the PII/450

    Put one of the 10GB 5400s from the PII/450 to the PI/150

    And then the other 10GB to the PII/266.............It has two drives........the 2.1 goes out, and a 10 comes in with the 8.4.

    Looks like an interesting weekend?

    So, when it doesn't work............who shall I blame
    The Pentium you have that's 150MHz, is more than enough. BSD isn't exactly high on the list of required hardware list. As I said before, because of the way BSD does things, you can even choose to use old versions of it to make it work better on older hardware. Now, it won't run on any 8088 or anything like that, but a 386 will "work".

    You aren't going to get much out of a 386 mind you, but it'll boot.

    I said that I don't have anything older than a 433 MHz Celeron, but it's in no way a limit. You can run BSD on very little. The book "The Complete FreeBSD" of which you can currently get two versions from the FreeBSD Mall, one of which is third edition, which I have, it's great and came with my BSD PowerPak, and then I bought the 4th Edition, which works with 5.0, and inside, it tells you how to make around 16 MBs of RAM work just fine.

    You can get by with 4 MBs of RAM if you get the 3.x line though. I know that seems weird in the days of 4 GB of RAM coming standard, but you can!

    Just remember than in most of the Unix World; RAM means more than Processor most of the time. The only time a Processor is going to matter at all really, is when you do number crunching. Most times, RAM means more.

  9. #19
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    The 386 would be the bare minimum, as most *nix like operating systems FreeBSD requires an MMU (besides needing a 32 bit cpu).

    The 10GB would do fine, just don't try to build Xorg from source then, this will quickly use up about 4GB of space. Definitely forget about building OpenOffice from scratch, that needs at least 8-10GB of free disk space

    Not to mention the time it'll take. I can remember back in the old days it took me a full day to build XFree86 from source

    Packages should work fine though.
    Last edited by SirDice; June 4th, 2011 at 02:38 PM.
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  10. #20
    Senior Member gore's Avatar
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    I don't even compile stuff on FreeBSD really; I like the pkg_add -r method very much. It works wonders, and now that Dice helped me figure out WTF had happened to KDM, I'm rolling lol.

    Basically, if you don't have the disk to do Compiles from Ports, you can do something even easier:

    Log in as root, then, issue this command:

    pkg_add -r gdm windowmaker enlightenment epplets bash zsh xorg gnome fvwm fvwm-crystal xmms audacious opera links mp3blaster dungeoncrawl vim

    Do the thing I posted about, where you open /etc/rc.conf in Vim, and add a few lines to it so you'll have proper Linux compatibility, and of course adding these lines to it too:

    vim /etc/rc.conf

    sshd_enable="YES"
    linux_enable="YES"
    hald_enable="YES"
    dbus_enable="YES"

    Once you have that all in there, hit "Escape" to go back to command mode, and then hit this:

    :wq

    Hit Enter, and it saves the file.

    You can also add something there for sound support as well, but it's pretty easy too for the most part. The only real trouble I've ever had with that was trying to make sure I had the right name of the driver.

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