Free BSD 6.1

Well, as many of you may already know [all 3 of you who read this blog], my failure rate at installing BSD on my desktop machine has been pretty high, nigh on 100%.

What made particularly frustrating was the fact that each version of BSD I installed would have just one piece of hardware that it wouldn't work with...everything else would work fine.

But: it was always be a critical piece of hardware, such as either my video card or my NIC card.

So, I would end up with a BSD installation that would work fine, except I couldn't get on the Internet, or I could get on the Internet, but my graphics would be messed up.

Either way, it was a deal breaker.

My last partial success was with Open Solaris, which as a 'live CD,' worked with everything, but not being able save anything began to drive me crazy.

So, the other day, on a 'lark,' I picked up a recent version of Free BSD 6.1 [a 'live CD' version of the Romanian BSIE [Free System Burned in Economy--huh?? Um, OK....], which, oddly, didn't work with my NIC card the first time I tried it--see blog entry below] that I had downloaded and gotten to work.

The thing I liked about it was, not only did it appear to work with both my NIC card and video card, but it also recognized my Linux Backup partition, which was a plus.

So, yesterday, I popped it in and crossed my fingers: I was going for a HDD install....which last time I tried this with BSD, I stupidly erased my backup drive!

Now, though, ever so slightly older and wiser, I made sure I could identify my backup drive in BSD before I began the install and, also, that I could identify my primary drive: the one I'd be installing to.

[Unix uses a rather esoteric and, not very intuitive, system of identifying hard drives, mathematically, using 'cylinder head numbers' or something equally 'user friendly,' so, it makes it hard to identify which hard drive is which, when it looks like: ad0 or sl010, but, very easy to misidentify a hard drive and accidentally format it during installation, which is what happened to me the first time!]

With these precautions in mind, I popped in the CD, crossed my fingers and prayed to the PC Gods.

The BSIE install is a little easier and more intuitive than the standard Sysinstall which normally comes with BSD, so that made it a bit easier this time.

Still.......there were a couple menu page which were a bit confusing and I went 'round and round' a few times before getting it right. On BSD installations, sometimes it's not always clear if a given operation has actually been performed....so sometimes you go back and forth trying to figure it out.

But, finally: the BIG MOMENT arrived: the Message "Installation Complete--Now Reboot" arrived--would it, though?

A final, 'deal breaking' problem I always used to have was older versions of BSD install would invariably install only the base OS, with NO GUI--and, even in cases where I would get a GUI, such as Gnome or KDE installed from the CD, I could never figure out out to 'activate' it, ie: make it work--so, I'd be left staring at a CLI [Command Line Interface] screen, with no way to get to the GUI [and, here I bow to the UNIX Gurus, who always know how to do things like this].

However, the PC Gods were with me this time, and when Free BSD booted, low and behold, it booted directly into KDE 3.5 and it worked with my NIC card too!

So, barring some further major catastrophe that I haven't foreseen, I should be good to go!

Stay tuned: will Mikey now abandon Linux in favor of becoming a BSD geek??