Re: Is FreeBSD just a sandbox for hackers?

Ranter <anonymous@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
But I wanted something a little more sophisticated for the
console than a 80x25 VGA non-scrollable text-mode display. What
are my options? Apparently I still don't have any good ones.
Except for raw X, there's still only Gnome and KDE (maybe later
there'll be xfce). I'd brought up KDE a couple of years ago and
it ran like a slug on the old hardware (200MHz P1, Matrox Mill2
video, 9GB SCSI UW2 disk), so I switched to Gnome, which ran a
little faster if not so decoratively.

On my laptop (which has an Intel graphics system) i can get very
beautiful console with very fine resolution. This requires recompiling a
kernel with
options SC_PIXEL_MODE
and playing with vidcontrol to find a nice setting which works.

Such thing like
font8x16="iso15-thin-8x16.fnt"
font8x14="iso15-8x14"
font8x8="iso15-8x8"
allscreens_flags="MODE_27 green black"
but with better mode, in /etc/rc.conf


If you want to run X and the machine is underpowered, there are
environments far lighter than gnome or KDE, such as fvwm2,
icewm, fluxbox, xfce, etc.



Is the project mired in the Puritan idea that moral worth comes
from hardship? Do key people who work on FBSD secretly (or maybe
openly) believe in the old not-quite-joke that since it was hard
to develop, it should be hard to use, and that anyone who doesn't
want to spend a week or a month figuring out how to piece things
together should just admit they're effete lusers and stick to
Windoze or a Mac? We all know people like that, I'm sure. Yet,
funnily enough, those same people ride bikes and drive cars
without having first assembled them from ill-fitting parts.


Let me quote a mail appearing very recently in the FreeBSD mailing
lists, written by a high profile developer Dag-Erling Smorgrav

http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=58974+0+archive/2008/freebsd-hackers/20081026.freebsd-hackers

"
Ian Smith <smithi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
Re your original issue, can you get any mileage out of using
acpi_ibm,
devd and this post and/or the other one it references:

The laptop in question does not run FreeBSD. I gave up running FreeBSD
on any sort of desktop or laptop computer years ago.
"

So i think you can safely replace "secretly" by "openly" above. If you
want no problem, no fuss unixlike system on a laptop, Ubuntu is the
obvious choice, otherwise a Mac running Mac OS X, if you agree to pay the
Mac tax. If you want to tinker, and your laptop doesn't have too hard
ACPI problems, you can get good results with FreeBSD. FreeBSD used to
work OK on IBM Thinkpads, but here you had to pay the super IBM tax, and
it seems that newer Lenovo laptops are not well supported. Maybe Dell
laptops work OK. My Sony Vaio is more or less supported under FreeBSD
(read no suspend, things work only with FreeBSD-7, etc.) but much better
with Ubuntu.




--

Michel TALON

.

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