No Linux, What?!?
I've been a pretty die hard proponent of Linux for a while. Some other things have caught my attention, but Gentoo and it's customizable package management has kept me on it for 4 years now. I mean, what other distro is famous for telling people to not file bugs on a package the DAY it is released. And I love that, because when I ran SuSe or Redhat, I was always months behind the community, not up there with it.
Well, I recently had my original motherboard from while I was in school die. This meant that while I had newer power supplies and monitors and IDE drives galore, and two graphics cards that were good enough, I still didn't have any working machines. My wife was going to let me buy some beast of a machine with a New graphics card and such, but at the moment, I don't think I'd really use it. So I settled on a pair of decent AMD x2 64 bit combos with ram and motherboard to get both machines back up and in action using the old AGP cards. (I think there were only like 4 or 5 sets that are still AGP, they are almost Obsolete it seems). Then I went ahead and burned a AMD 64 Gentoo boot CD, and that weekend I had all the normal stuff I like up and running. But within a few days we noticed it was pretty laggy, I spent about 3 days trying to get the ATI drivers to work with any of the linux 2.6.23 to 2.6.25 kernels with no luck. So I went ahead and got the Xorg radeon drivers going and glx gears was giving me 800 FPS, 130 FPS maximized at full screen. So that was certainly good enough for the graphics side, but I still had all this lag. I started looking around, and found that there's some IO issues in the kernel for the last year starting about 2.6.17 that's been going on. This guy would have his MySQL freeze up for 30 seconds or so while doing a copy of a large backup file. Now this got me thinking, and other AMD 64 peeps had problems. Now, it's not too terribly helpful to the kernel guys to say things slow down when you do a copy, but the fact it's change allot over the year is scary. That and the API changes which are causing the fglrx driver not to compile, got me ticked off. It seems to be considerably worse under 64, but I know the system seemed off to me even when I was running 32 bit, so maybe it was me noticing scheduling issues as much as it was the board.
So I went ahead and tried FreeBSD which I've been wanting to do for awhile. I recently saw that Firefox is using some of the BSD low level C libraries due to their speed, and I've heard the developers are supposed to be a bit more sane about their work. So I did a FreeBSD 7.0 install, and it booted with X and no problems. It took me awhile to learn how groovy the whereis command is, and get the hang of ports, but I can get what I need on the system fairly easily. It's also pretty up to date, with GnuCash being the same version as what's stable on Gentoo. Ports isn't anything compared to Gentoo's package system, maybe snappier since it's make based, which means the grunt work is all in C, but still not nearly as feature rich or comprehensive in the commands. But I'm sure I've got a number of tricks to learn.
Still, it's been pretty darn cool, and I've certainly got 90% of the stuff working great. The other thing, is that to have everything, like flash 9 and JAVA in Firefox working, I think I'd have to run a 32 bit linux system, which I may just do for browsing. Then again, I could probably xen or CD boot a fairly small system for that. Either way, the default browser set up I have is working well and not nearly as hokey when it comes to running multiple things.
Well, I recently had my original motherboard from while I was in school die. This meant that while I had newer power supplies and monitors and IDE drives galore, and two graphics cards that were good enough, I still didn't have any working machines. My wife was going to let me buy some beast of a machine with a New graphics card and such, but at the moment, I don't think I'd really use it. So I settled on a pair of decent AMD x2 64 bit combos with ram and motherboard to get both machines back up and in action using the old AGP cards. (I think there were only like 4 or 5 sets that are still AGP, they are almost Obsolete it seems). Then I went ahead and burned a AMD 64 Gentoo boot CD, and that weekend I had all the normal stuff I like up and running. But within a few days we noticed it was pretty laggy, I spent about 3 days trying to get the ATI drivers to work with any of the linux 2.6.23 to 2.6.25 kernels with no luck. So I went ahead and got the Xorg radeon drivers going and glx gears was giving me 800 FPS, 130 FPS maximized at full screen. So that was certainly good enough for the graphics side, but I still had all this lag. I started looking around, and found that there's some IO issues in the kernel for the last year starting about 2.6.17 that's been going on. This guy would have his MySQL freeze up for 30 seconds or so while doing a copy of a large backup file. Now this got me thinking, and other AMD 64 peeps had problems. Now, it's not too terribly helpful to the kernel guys to say things slow down when you do a copy, but the fact it's change allot over the year is scary. That and the API changes which are causing the fglrx driver not to compile, got me ticked off. It seems to be considerably worse under 64, but I know the system seemed off to me even when I was running 32 bit, so maybe it was me noticing scheduling issues as much as it was the board.
So I went ahead and tried FreeBSD which I've been wanting to do for awhile. I recently saw that Firefox is using some of the BSD low level C libraries due to their speed, and I've heard the developers are supposed to be a bit more sane about their work. So I did a FreeBSD 7.0 install, and it booted with X and no problems. It took me awhile to learn how groovy the whereis command is, and get the hang of ports, but I can get what I need on the system fairly easily. It's also pretty up to date, with GnuCash being the same version as what's stable on Gentoo. Ports isn't anything compared to Gentoo's package system, maybe snappier since it's make based, which means the grunt work is all in C, but still not nearly as feature rich or comprehensive in the commands. But I'm sure I've got a number of tricks to learn.
Still, it's been pretty darn cool, and I've certainly got 90% of the stuff working great. The other thing, is that to have everything, like flash 9 and JAVA in Firefox working, I think I'd have to run a 32 bit linux system, which I may just do for browsing. Then again, I could probably xen or CD boot a fairly small system for that. Either way, the default browser set up I have is working well and not nearly as hokey when it comes to running multiple things.
posted by Robert Zaleski at 7:20 AM
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