FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE Review

MRE writes "Well it's been out for a week an a half, but here's the first review of FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE. Or if you want to download the new release and try it for yourself, it's only one ISO image away."

Comments

Re:Uh....

[Shurhaian]

My computer is a semi-old and quite unreliable pile o' junk. That Windows hates it is no surprise(though Windows actually does support my nVidia GeForce card's 3D acceleration). I've tried Red Hat, two versions of Mandrake, and Debian.

FreeBSD is the only thing I've tried that'd keep running if I didn't poke at it. And when I did choose to poke at it, it was most tolerant of it, and - thanks in large part to the devfs system - it's FAR easier to tell what I should be poking AT. Especially for my USB card reader - attach the device, and there it is, a brand new entry, /dev/ums0. Much easier than muddling through a whole tangle of device nodes and hoping that one of them is what I'm looking for.

And for all the extra time it takes, I'm very fond of the ports tree's default-ish approach of "compile from source to suit the system". My Linux experience was fraught with library conflicts in binary packages; in FreeBSD I've hit a few snags, but they were much more easily resolved - although the process was time-consuming, it was not terribly attention-consuming.

For a supposedly dead OS, FreeBSD lives quite well indeed on my system, when the Linux distros I've tried all died in short order. If only I had the space to compile OpenOffice, I'd be set.

Now I just hope the review hasn't been /.'d by the time I get home from work(.com is blocked by the firewall, .org is not. Maybe there's a /.er on my IT staff?).