Love it! But a few questions - PC-BSD Forums

zektor · #1 07-30-2012, 10:06 PM

Hello! Coming from Windows (of course) and Linux (Mepis, Ubuntu, etc) I find that PC BSD is very very nice! I especially love the PBI thing. The whole "no dependencies" thing is the main reason I decided to give it is a try.

Just about everything seems to work great. However, there are some oddities that I just do not understand. I am running the 9.1 beta 1 by the way. Here is the list:

1. The mounted drives. I have one SSD (that PC BSD resides on) and a 3TB and 2TB internal SATA drives, both formatted NTFS. Well, when I open dolphin, I see "2TB" (the name of the 2tb drive) listed three times. Same goes for the 3tb drive (named 3tb as well). Two of the drives will do nothing clicked, but ONE (of each) will actually mount and display the contents. I have an external E-SATA drive named "G-Drive" that had the same thing. Funny thing is that I am now copying to the "working" G-Drive and the notification area shows it as /media/G-Drive-3.

Why is this duplication of mounted drives happening, and how can I make it STOP?

2. When I create a folder on the desktop and drag/move dekstop icons into it, it renamed them as "xxx.desktop" ("x" being a partial filename). Why? Why can't it just look the same as it does on the desktop itself? The reason I have to do this is to try to organize these icons. Every single item you download from AppCafe creates an icon on the desktop. There should be an option to stop it from doing that, as I rarely "need" icons on the desktop.

3. I cannot open any .doc files from any of the NTFS drives. I have my resume on the 3TB drive, but I get an error when I try to access it. I installed LibreOffice, but still get an error. However, if I COPY the document to my home folder and run it, it launches just fine. I don't understand why this is happening, as other files (.avi, .txt, .mp3, etc) do launch fine from the drives.

4. Not a problem, but a simple question. When you download apps, does the HD retain the PBI files? If so, where are they located? I would like to back them up just in case I ever want to install them on an offline system.

I figured I'd chime in with these issues not because I am being negative with PC-BSD. Just the opposite. I am running this as my primary OS for now, as I really like the simplicity, no dependencies, etc....but I would like to get these issues fixed. Any ideas?

zektor · #2 07-30-2012, 10:28 PM

Oops...to be accurate, the drives are listed TWO times (not three as stated). Just clearing that up. Thanks for any help!

Edit again: I am wrong entirely. I downlaoded SWFDec (to play some swf files I have, and each drive is listed FIVE times!) What is happening here, and why?

purgatori · #3 07-31-2012, 05:28 AM

The answer to 1 and 3 is probably the same: support for NTFS under PC/FreeBSD is not perfect. If you can, I would advise re-formatting your drives to UFS, ZFS, or FAT32.

I agree that the creation of icons for every application that is installed by Appcafe is annoying. Deleting them is easy enough though:

Code:

$ rm -v ~/Desktop/*.desktop

Assuming you're using KDE, I'm also pretty confident that there is an option buried somewhere within that confusing control panel interface to turn off the display off desktop icons. If not, then you could cheekily remove write permissions from ~/Desktop:

Code:

$ chmod a-w ~/Desktop

I would reserve that as a last resort, though.

As for PBIs being cached locally; no, I don't think that happens.

fluca1978 · #4 07-31-2012, 06:35 AM

1) you probably have the hard disk partitioned, therefore the disk appears as a couple of disk with the same name. This also explains why you cannot see one of the disk contents (probably is formatted with a not supported file system). At least this is what comes into my mind.

2) I remember this being a setting of the plasma workspace (the heart of KDE), but I don't remember when it is.

3) as steted by purgatori there is some problem accessing the NTFS partition, the support for read/write NTFS is still lacking. Could it be the file is compressed?

4) I don't think so.

Tiberius Duval · #5 07-31-2012, 12:25 PM

NTFS support is indeed somewhat quirky, I can acces all my NTFS drives, but for example playing mp3's directly from them can lead to problems, once whole system crashed so that only remedy was hard reset button. Solution, I copy to zfs drive all I want to play and play them from there.

fluca1978 · #6 08-02-2012, 03:43 PM

Originally Posted by Tiberius Duval

NTFS support is indeed somewhat quirky, I can acces all my NTFS drives, but for example playing mp3's directly from them can lead to problems, once whole system crashed so that only remedy was hard reset button. Solution, I copy to zfs drive all I want to play and play them from there.

A trick I did years ago was to set up a small partition, formatted fat32, and put all the win/linux/bsd shared stuff there. So it was almost read/write-able from any OS.

zektor · #7 08-02-2012, 11:22 PM

Thanks for the replies. Just as I suspected with the NTFS volumes. One drive was actually corrupted (partition table!) by PC-BSD. Luckily, I keep backups

How does EXT4 function with PC-BSD?

As for .PBI not being cached locally, this would be a nice option for AppCafe! So they can be kept, installed offline on other PC-BSD systems, or reinstalled on the system without having to redownload. Just an idea

Tiberius Duval · #8 08-03-2012, 12:12 AM

As far as I know not very good, I have not been able to mount (at least graphically, hadn't tried from shell) my ext4 partitions, I'm currently using ntfs partitions as go between when I want to transferr something from Ubuntu to PC-BSD.

purgatori · #9 08-03-2012, 12:18 AM

Originally Posted by zektor

Thanks for the replies. Just as I suspected with the NTFS volumes. One drive was actually corrupted (partition table!) by PC-BSD. Luckily, I keep backups

How does EXT4 function with PC-BSD?

As for .PBI not being cached locally, this would be a nice option for AppCafe! So they can be kept, installed offline on other PC-BSD systems, or reinstalled on the system without having to redownload. Just an idea

R/o (read only?) support is installed by default for EXT4-formatted disks.[1] As fluca suggested, a drive or partition formatted in FAT32 probably allows for the most widespread support.

[1] PCBSD for Linux Users

fluca1978 · #10 08-03-2012, 05:48 AM

Originally Posted by purgatori

support is installed by default for EXT4-formatted disks.

Yes, but do not expect blindingly fast performances! As a rule of thumb, FreeBSD can read from a lot of file systems, but write support for others than UFS, ZFS, FAT is not supported as it is on Linux.