The Linux Extremist

Cousins can sometimes make one wonder how on earth people so dissimilar can be related. While I would love to get my hands on a Sidewinder missile, I have a cousin in Norway who won ridicule from the rest of the family because he volunteered to clean toilets and pick up litter rather than do his service in the military; ala Eric Idle, he gave off an impression which said, “No sir, I’m not a pacifist, sir, I’m a coward.” If that was the sole extent of his foibles, the family would be well pleased, but suffice it to say that is the least of his problems.

Linux also has a cousin, the BSD operating system, and fortunately it’s a much better relative. While I am a Linux enthusiast, I have nothing against BSD; it is Open Source, freely distributed, and also well engineered. I once did an experiment by having one my company’s e-commerce solutions (using PHP and MySQL) put on a FreeBSD server. Not too long ago, I checked on how it was doing.

I asked my friend who keeps tabs on it, “In the past 3 years, how many times has the server crashed?”

“None.”

I then asked, “How many times has it required rebooting?”

“It hasn’t.”

“Has it ever been hacked?”

“No.”

“So you’ve had no problems with it whatosever?”

“No problems at all.”

This level of performance is impressive; as a result, FreeBSD has been a solution that I’ve been happy to use whenever appropriate. After all, diversity is one of the hallmarks of Open Source, and FreeBSD adds another option to the palette of solutions one can use. However, hitherto its benefits have been largely exclusive to servers. The FreeBSD does not discourage this impression with its motto: “The Power to Serve”.

This bias is in the process of changing with the arrival of both the DesktopBSD and PC BSD projects. One of the privileges of having 4 computers in my home is that I can use one of them to try it out.

For the purposes of this experiment, I’m choosing PC BSD. There’s a reason for it - I’ve been interested in this particular project for quite some time and have been following its progress. It appears to be very promising in making BSD palatable to desktop users.

Some hardware research to prepare for the installation is a must. I will be using an old Pentium 4 machine with the following specification:

Pentium 4, 2.4 Ghz

1.5 GB RAM

Gigabyte GA-8ID533 Motherboard

Seagate Barracuda 120 GB 7200 RPM hard drive

C-Media sound card (disguised as a Philips sound card)

Nvidia GeForce 6600 256 MB RAM AGP x8 Graphics card

Fortunately, little change is required; PC BSD retains some Linux biases - for example, Nvidia support appears to be much better than that which is available for ATI. Wireless card selection is trickier than with Linux; I have been able to establish that PC BSD supports Intel wireless, such as in Centrino chipsets. I have also read that it supports wireless cards with Atheros chipsets. The wireless card on it previously was a Zyxel PCI card; however as this of the Texas Instruments ACX chipset, BSD support is less clear-cut. In its place is going an SMC SMCWPCIT-G EZ Connect PCI card which relies on Atheros. Apart from this one substitution, my setup should require no change to run PC BSD successfully and have full wireless internet and multimedia features.

There are things which I am curious about -

1. Will its rock solid stability as a server carry over in terms of performance as a desktop?

2. How well does it compare to Ubuntu Linux?

3. How much more difficult is it to set up than Ubuntu Linux?

These questions will be answered as part of this investigation. All how-tos will be posted here, along with reviews of its performance. For the moment, the wireless card is in the post, the intended computer sleeps soundly with Ubuntu on its drive; soon we will learn how well it copes with a new OS.

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