FreeBSD

ethan on 2003-01-26T21:34:54

Spontaneously I decided to install FreeBSD on my machine. I still had an unused 50G partition so I thought why not.

I can't yet say that I am extremely impressed which shouldn't be a surprise since I didn't configure anything yet. At least installation itself was a snap and appearantly even most of my hardware has been properly recognized. FreeBSD however was a little too ambitious with my video card. Starting X results in something miniaturistic...looks like it tried the maximum resolution which is ridiculously small really.

But I am excited! Reminds me of the good ol' days of installing and configuring Debian in little steps: soundcard, making X run, then the hassle with a modem internet connection, afterwards the TV card, upgrade to DSL etc. But it might be harder on FreeBSD...I am rather clueless where it keeps all of its files. Currently I don't even have a scroll-back buffer on the console (but an odd mouse pointer: instead of the white square that I know from Linux under the console, FreeBSD comes with a nice little arrow that looks funny and unexpected on a console).

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FreeBSD

kjones4 on 2003-01-26T22:21:16

www.freebsddiary.org is a good resource for FreeBSD howtos. The person who maintains the site blogged all of his experiences installing and learning about FreeBSD over last several years. /stand/sysinstall is nice little utility. I'd recommend 4.7 over 5.0 until the 5.0 branch settles down a bit.

Scrollback

Dom2 on 2003-01-27T07:57:48

To get scrollback on the console, press scroll lock. Then you can use shift-pageup or shift-pagedown to get scrolling. Press scroll lock again to get out of it.

-Dom

Re:Scrollback

ethan on 2003-01-27T09:28:05

And I always wondered whether Scroll-Lock does in fact get used for anything! Obviously I haven't tried FreeBSD early enough.