Jumpin' from distro to distro

Given the intermittent hang problems I've been having with FreeBSD and its derivative PC-BSD, I decided to explore the "other" side a bit and try out some Linux distros. Linux would actually be a better fit for me professionally, as we have a few parts of our product that run on Linux (RedHat is the "officially supported" distro), while the closest we get to FreeBSD is our MacOSX client. And I've had pretty good luck in the past with them, so what the heck?

I downloaded a few random distros and tried them out. Not to get into any distro war, but I just grabbed a few popular distros.

• Xandros : I have pimped this distro in the past, so I figured I'd try it again on this troublesome machine.


• Freespire : the free version of the highly touted Linspire (formerly Lindows, I think) distro


• Mandriva : A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I used this one when it was called "Mandrake". In fact, I think it was the very first alternative OS I ever tried.

But in the end, each had their own peculiar and show-stopping set of errors:

• Xandros : I remember being wildly impressed with just how smoothly it integrated into my Windows network. And the install went about as easy as you could imagine, although it is a little scary to let these distros use an entire hard drive. It is an empty one, so it is free to go about its business, but what if I pick the wrong drive? All the warnings in the world won't help if I choose hd2 instead of hd5 and don't notice! So I check, and double check and then move on. But it surprised me in that I couldn't find any of my other Windows partitions. Not like PCBSD, where they are automatically part of your system and can easily be mounted. In fact, I couldn't even find the partitions in /dev, which was weird.


• Freespire : Didn't get very far in this one. I got to the "Choose a hard drive" screen but couldn't find the Next button I was supposed to click on! And it was also a bare-bones display, that didn't list the current partitions on the hard drive, so it was extra scary to use.


• Mandriva : I used the "Mandrive One" version, which is a "Live" cd, which means you can boot and run from it, rather than just install. So you can sort of take it for a test drive before actually touching your hard drive. And there is a link on the desktop to install it, so it's a nice way to get into it. And the install went pretty smoothly, although it took a long time. But it got confused, or maybe I got confused, at the end of it. It said to click the okay button to reboot, which I did, but I don't think it actually rebooted. And there didn't seem to be anyway in the Live version to reboot, so I just hit the reset button. Which gummed up the Linux partitions so they wouldn't mount or fsck. Sigh...

So I think I'm going to head back to PC-BSD and try to figure out the hang/freeze problem. Oddly enough, it was, I think, nearly the best installation and integration package I used, which is great news. It installed smoothly (once I got a good cd built), and it finds both my Windows network and my local Windows hard drives without any effort on my part. But the hang is a problem obviously, as is the hang when I click on the Home icon. But maybe the two are connected, which would be good, as an easily reproducible problem is almost always solvable, while a random hang is not.

All this wandering about the alternative OS forest has got me thinking about why I find FreeBSD so fascinating. It might be too geeky to admit it, but I get a certain warm feeling inside when I'm dabbling in FreeBSD that I don't get when working with Windows or Linux. There seems to be a coherence and singular vision, combined with a real do-it-yourself, bare metal approach that resonates with me. Windows is too much of a monolithic black box, while Linux feels too haphazard and scatter-shot. So it's back to the drawing board with PC-BSD to see what I can get to work.